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Journal of Chinese
Architecture and Urbanism Gestures for interdependence: Designing the unfelt

Note to the readers: The author of the following text is and, consequently, new forms of spatial esthesis (Ranciere,
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speaking as an assemblage of partial perspectives meandering 2013; Vasquez, 2022). Collectively, we are moving away
between an academic/universal “we”, the “we” as part of a from spaces that generate aesthetic experiences based on
group of fieldwork participants, the “I” as a researcher, the extraction towards spaces that instigate reparative and
“I” as a participant, and the imaginary “you” as a reader. regenerative modes of togetherness, co-existence and
relationality. On the verge of extractivism , we wonder how
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1. Introduction spatial design oscillates between extractive or regenerative
The field of regenerative spatial design sometimes seems gestures. Where do both gestures meet in our spatial
to limit itself to concerns of biotechnological performance experience?
or the measurement of a building’s carbon footprint. The In the introduction of Arts for Living on a Damaged Planet,
starting point for this paper is the incorporation of practices Nils Bubandt reflects on the Anthropocene as the“Great
that are concerned with how we relate ontologically to Acceleration” that is “best understood through immersion
more-than-human entities — formerly known as resources. in many small and situated rhythms. Big stories take their
Through prototyping a series of performative experiments, form from seemingly minor contingencies, asymmetrical
this paper aims to expand the spatial designer’s metaphorical encounters, and moments of indeterminacy” (Tsing et al.,
toolbox from an efficiency-driven and human-centered 2017). In this paper, we aim to understand these “situated
design position toward an embodied design attitude. We rhythms and asymmetrical encounters” as an aesthetic
are exploring how an engagement with rivers (as more- matter. To understand better the aesthetics of extraction, we
than-human entities that bridge site, place and space) can will introduce the notion of the unfelt, trying to foreground
help spatial designers to regenerate their thinking-being- unheard bodies and unseen landscapes of extraction in
doing from a position of impermeability to an attitude of relation to spatial design. We will explore this through a
fluidity. New modes of cocreation are explored through a dramaturgical approach to the site (see Section 2.2). The
series of sensorial experiments, resulting in a performative PhD project Regenerative Spatial Dramaturgies (RSD)
script: A hands-on tool (the so-called “score”) that aims to focuses on the experience of the unfelt in artistic practices
further nurture the field of regenerative design through that are site-specific, process, and space-oriented . For the
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collaborative, experiential, and embodied learning. purpose of improving the clarity of this article, we will focus
on unseen bodies of water (the sea and the river) in relation
2. Spatial aesthetics of the unfelt to a series of fieldwork experiments. The aim is to renegotiate
2.1. From a drain to a fountain our relationship with bodies of water as more-than-human
entities, where our focus will be to design with them instead
The reality of environmental and societal change performs of designing for them or against them. To illustrate this, I
on us through various aesthetic spatial experiences. The would like to share the following anecdote.
ontological turn (Escobar, 2018) rooted in humanities and
the arts have been increasingly influencing the discourse In 2020, I visited the Non-extractive Architecture
on spatial design in the demand for a reconfiguration exhibition at VAC in Venice. The exhibition was by far one
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of how spatial design frameworks create regenerative 3 We understand esthesis as the subjective embodied process of
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and relational ways of doing, thinking, and being esthetic experience, different from the abstract, objectifying,
(Escobar, 2018) instead of conforming the extractive and and distancing notion of “esthetics”. The writing of Rolando
individualist approach installed by modernity. Sequentially, Vasquez elaborates on a series of decolonial pedagogies
many transdisciplinary practitioners in arts and design regarding aesthesis in his essay Vistas of Modernity, 2020,
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are exploring a transformation of the dominant design Mondriaan Fund, Amsterdam (NL).
frameworks (colonial, neoliberal, exploitative, and binary) 4 Extractivism is generally understood as the removal of
by generating provocative and innovative design attitudes natural resources particularly for export with minimal
processing. In this paper, we expand the term toward sites
and bodies that are exploited without consent for purposes
1 Using the term regeneration, we aim to expand it beyond within capitalist economies.
neoliberal processes of landscape and city development. We 5 This paper is based on experiments in the 1st year of the PhD
use it to indicate processes of renewal and restoration of our trajectory of Breg Horemans. Epistemologically, the larger
relationality with more-than-human entities and biological attempt within the PhD is to make a shift from a (positivist)
systems. The term invites us to think of spatial design as result based research methodology to an approach of artistic
designing-with-living entities as opposed to the dominance research where embodied and process based knowledge is
of the extractive and exploitative systems of late capitalism. foregrounded.
2 A form of disciplinarity in which procedures and esthetic features 6 Grima J. and Space Caviar, Non-extractive Architecture,
of different disciplines are merged into a new hybrid forms. VAC, Venice (IT), March 2021-January 2022.

Volume 5 Issue 2 (2023) 2 https://doi.org/10.36922/jcau.0358