Fall 2015 Fellow
Fellow: James Andrews
Project: Spatial Resistance

ABOUT SPATIAL RESISTANCE

With Spatial Resistance, James developed a series of free, public, exploratory workshops that focused on the spatial dimension of civil resistance. These workshops considered how to shape, engage, analyze and activate space, through utilizing tools and methods used in architecture, mapping, modeling, data visualization, and wayfinding. James combined the core principles of grassroots democracy, prefigurative politics and direct action with the techniques and methods of contemporary architecture and planning, street art, formal decentralization and self-organizing systems. The term spatial resistance implies not only physical space—a three dimensional field—but also the narrative and time-based dimensions. Spatial resistance can also mean examining and analyzing our own internalized blind-spots and forms of oppression, our untapped vision and skills, and the limits we impose on our movements.

This project served a dual function: to engage and educate protest planners and the public around the importance of spatial/architectural concerns within civil resistance work, and to serve as a call-to-action for architects, architecture students and teachers, artists and designers, media-makers and builders, to directly engage social movement planning and organizing, where architectural concerns are paramount.

Three public workshops occurred: a traditional design charrette within a design-field space, a street class within a movement-space or protest, and a think tank within a public school that was vulnerable to closure/co-location.

News and UPdates

DRAWINGS EXHIBITED IN ARTIFACTS AND AFTER EFFECTS EXHIBITION

ARTIST BIO

James Andrews is an artist, educator, organizer, curator, and strategist based in New York City. His work involves decentralized intelligence and new forms of collective organization.  Andrews has exhibited, taught, performed, presented and organized extensively at museums, galleries, schools, and alternative spaces across the US and Europe.