After the successful first session, we are pleased to invite you to the second Feminist Spatial Practice Share on Wednesday October 25th from 12:00pm-1:00pm ET (Zoom Link).

We have initiated the online Practice Share as a way to celebrate feminist spatial practices and connect with likeminded practitioners across the globe. In the second session Ruo Jia (IfWorks) and Bilge Bal are invited to present their practice, after which we will have a collective conversation mediated me, Renske Maria van Dam.

Feel free to share this invitation, everybody is welcome.
We are also happy to announce that the third Feminist Spatial Practice Share will be hosted at Wednesday December 6th at 3.30pm ET. Mark your calendars!

We are looking forward to meeting you online!

Ruo Jia is an architect/artist/theorist/historian/educator based in New York City. She has a Ph.D. in Architectural History and Theory from Princeton University School of Architecture with an interdisciplinary humanities certificate from Media+Modernity, a M.Arch.II from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and a M.Arch. and a B.Arch. from Southeast University School of Architecture. She is the founder and director of the research-based practice IfWorks, exploring art/architecture possibilities individually or collectively. Currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture at Pratt Institute, she has also taught at Harvard, CUNY, Columbia, and Princeton. Her research focuses on constructing a decolonizing postmodernist materialist space through the interweaving of “Chinese Experimental Architecture” and “French Poststructuralist Theory,” which expands to envisioning the possibilities of Asian Feminist Architecture, and Posthumanist Sustainability.

Bilge Bal is a PhD architect and educator, currently living, making, drawing, and telling stories in Istanbul. Her practice is open to collaborative and multiscalar actions with a transdisciplinary view. Feminist pedagogy and dirty theory influence her political and ethical position. She explores the autobiographical as a research methodology caring about the journey of ‘self’ to reveal both uniqueness and plurality. She has led experimental design studios and drawing studios at Istanbul Kent University since 2015: “Design education resembles walking in the fictional woods. If I am a joyful militant who steps into it, my walk leads me into a quite dangerous, speculative, transformative, and experimental process, generated collectively and held gently. Joyful Militancy: Remembering of Air, Care & Touch is about a two-year-old freshman year design studio experiment, having two folds as Encounters & Beginnings. In the studio, our stories are not about controlling things, creating atmospheres of fear, mistrust, resentment, and anger but they are about being alive, putting our stories in dialogue with each other, embracing encouragement, kindness, love, trust, and flourishing that can erase power relations. It means willing to be troubled: tracing entanglements without reducing complexities and contradictions, co-constructing a fluid geography of troubled and beautiful messiness to walk with creativity, courage, care, questions, curiosity, and experimentation. The freshman year design studio has the potential to facilitate making kin, and by thinking, making, and feeling through this process, one can learn how to learn beyond schooling, radical perfectionism, and lack-finding. I wish it is not the end, but the beginning of a conversation.”