Participants

Cathy Turner is Professor of Drama at the University of Exeter. Her work focuses on space, place and dramaturgy.  She is the author of Dramaturgy and Architecture: Theatre, Utopia and the Urban Environment (Palgrave, 2015) and co-author of Dramaturgy and Performance (with Synne Behrndt, Palgrave, 2008 (2016 2^nd edition). She has also edited (with Synne Behrndt) a special issue of Contemporary Theatre Review on ‘New Dramaturgies’ (2010) and they co-edit the Palgrave book series ‘New Dramaturgies’. She is a founder member of artists’ group Wrights & Sites, whose work concerns space and walking. Their ‘Mis-Guides’ are provocations to explore familiar cities in new ways (most recently, The Architect-Walker: A Mis-Guide, 2019). She led the AHRC research network ‘The Politics of Performance on the Urban Periphery in South India’ in 2018-19, looking at case studies of performance responding to growing cities in South India, in collaboration with colleagues at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore. She is currently editing a book arising from that research.

EAS Interests & Aspirations  

With a background in Drama, my current research relates to inter-disciplinary understandings of space, architecture and ecology, through performed and ritualized behaviours. Performing Gardens is a monograph project which explores the ways in which gardens have been spaces in which we perform our aspirational relationships to landscape, including landscapes of colonisation, battle, resource exploitation, and resistance as well as ideals of paradise on earth, romantic escapes or demonstrations of wealth and style. While these might be ‘performative’ actions of everyday rituals or unique moments of celebration, they also include a range of spectacles and performance events that express and realise these aspirations through the arts. This builds on my previous work on the inter-relationship of theatre and architecture, particularly in conceiving utopian ideas of modern city space. This project, and other projects in development, consider the interaction of fictional and ritual imaginations of space with material spaces and their development or design.

Beniamino Polimeni is a researcher, designer and an architectural conservator. His scholarly interests include architectural conservation, architecture representation and Islamic architecture. He received his Master Degree from the School of Architecture of the “Università Mediterranea” of Reggio Calabria in 2004, focusing his attention on architectural conservation from both a theoretical and technical point of view.  He studied from 2004 to 2006 at the Graduate School in Architectural and Landscape Heritage of the “Università Degli Studi di Genova”, undertaking field research in Mediterranean Maghreb and Eastern Asia.  Since 2007 he has been collaborating with several architecture firms as building conservation consultant and designer, while also participating in European Projects and International competitions. He received his PhD from the  Italian National Doctorate School in ‘Representation and Survey Sciences’ focusing his attention on the historical and structural aspects of the vernacular architecture of the Mediterranean area. After having acquired significant experiences as a postdoctoral fellow (Akpia@MIT) and assistant professor in Italy and Turkey respectively, he is currently a Lecturer at the Leicester School of Architecture at De Montfort University. In this institution, he is the Institute Head of Research Students and the Programme Leader of the MA in Architectural Design.

EAS Interests & Aspirations 

Developing spatial awareness using images, models and holograms. Platonic solids and operative design

This study focuses on spatial awareness of complex geometries by using images, physical models and Holograms to analyse the geometric qualities of 3D objects, generated from Regular Polyhedra. Through an operative design approach in which different examples are created using a combination of topological and standard modelling operations, this study explores different possibilities in which complex geometries can be represented and observed. In particular, the investigation is divided into two phases. In the first one, a visual catalogue of ninety rendered objects is created applying different geometric transformations to each of the six regular polyhedra. In the second phase, a group of three operations is applied sequentially to each Solid to produce a set of five sculptural objects to be printed in Polyamide (SLS) and subsequently recorded in Holographic plates. The goal of the proposed approach is to combine technical possibilities, operational working knowledge and awareness of spaces, bringing a different perspective to the study of design and architectural forms. The operations included in this investigation study can also be used as an interpretive guide for reading and understanding works and space that already exist.

Jennifer Richards, Joseph Cowen chair of English Literature, and the Director of the Newcastle University Humanities Research Institute. She is the author of several books, including Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature (Cambridge UP, 2003), Rhetoric: New Critical Idiom (Routledge, 2007), and Voices and Books in the English Renaissance: A New History of Reading (Oxford UP, 2019). She is a General Editor of the Oxford Thomas Nashe (6 volumes), and the lead of the AHRC-funded Thomas Nashe Project.

Maria Athanasiou holds a BA (Hons) in Applied Music Studies (Distinction) from the Department of Music Science and Art at the University of Macedonia (Greece), a Master’s degree in Art, Law and Economy (Distinction) from the International Hellenic University and a Ph.D. by research in Musicology from the International Centre for Music Studies at Newcastle University. She is currently a Senior Research Assistant at Northumbria University and a Music Language Tutor at the Centre for Advanced Training at Sage Gateshead. She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and holds diplomas in Piano, Advanced Harmony, Counterpoint and Fugue. 

Andrea Jelić is an architect and researcher dedicated to understanding how the built environment affects people’s bodily and emotional experiences through the lenses of enactive-embodied cognitive science and phenomenology. She is an Assistant Professor in Social Sustainability within Architecture and member of BBAR—Brain, Body, Architecture Research group at Aalborg University. Dr Jelić is an Advisory Council member of ANFA—Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture and faculty member in the Master program “Neuroscience applied to architectural design” at IUAV University of Venice.

Aleksandar Staničić is an architect and Assistant Professor at TU Delft Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, the Chair of Methods of Analysis and Imagination. Previously he was a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at TU Delft, research scholar at the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies, Columbia University, and postdoctoral fellow at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT. Aleksandar’s work stems from two book projects, War Diaries: Design after the Destruction of Art and Architecture (coeditor, University of Virginia Press, 2021) and Transition urbicide: Post-war reconstruction in post-socialist Belgrade (sole author, forthcoming). His is recipient of multiple grants and fellowships from the Graham Foundation, the European Commission, Government of Lombardy Region, Italy, and Ministry of Education, Republic of Serbia.

Magnus Williamson is Professor of Early Music in Newcastle University’s School of Arts & Cultures, chairman of the British Academy series, Early English Church Music, and principal investigator of numerous UKRI projects such as Tudor Partbooks (AHRC, 2104-17).  His research focuses on the sources and contexts of sacred music, 1300-1600.

EAS Interests and Aspirations 

The spatial turn in early music has focused largely on physical acoustics, architectural layouts, and ceremonial movement as contextual paradigms for historically-informed performances.  A different tendency within early music, with long antecedents, has focused on musical sources, their contexts, contents and notation. My current research investigates a surprisingly neglected interstices between these two areas of specialism: the experience of using large folio choirbooks at lecterns in medio chori, the singers standing in a huddle, all reading from the one book. Until very recently, this was the normative format for performing church music in Catholic traditions, but is seldom explored by contemporary performers, and overlooked  by musicologists interested more in the internal syntax of notation than its means of externalisation in performance.  Experiencing lectern-singing relates to the wider recent trend towards re-creating or re-imagining the physical circumstances of  musical performances as experienced phenomena rather than fixed sonic artefacts. 

Yasser Megahed is Senior Lecturer at Leicester School of Architecture, UK. Yasser holds a PhD by Design degree from the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, as well as MSc and BA degrees in Architecture. His by‐design research culminated in the architectural graphic novel: Practiceopolis, Journeys in the Architectural Profession forthcoming 2020 by Routledge. Yasser was an associate Architect at Design Office, UK. Previously he worked as a senior architect at Architecture and Urbanism Group, Cairo.

James Davoll (Newcastle University) is an award winning filmmaker and artist working across creative digital media, video installation, film, photography, performance and sound. He teaches across the School of Arts and Cultures.

James’ practice explores specific landscapes asking questions of their contemporary role, relevance and our emotive response to them. His practice seeks to investigate our complex and contradictory relationship with the natural world, particularly in relation to liminal spaces and borders. 

James’ films aim to push the intersection of the visual and sonic land/ seascape. Achieved by combining multiple technologies, juxtaposing traditional film techniques and observing the world through a slow cinematic lens. James’ improvised performances make use of live video editing, still frames, field recordings, creative programming and microphones. These when combined, push the boundaries of cinematic experience and film making, creating layered environments that challenge and provoke audiences.

James encourages aleatory methodologies both in his performances and his exhibition practice. Surrendering control to chance, audience and algorithm.

He has produced works for the likes of ResonanceExtra, the Being Human Festival, the Dark Outside Festival, Alchemy Film and Moving Image Festival and the Festival of Humanity. He has exhibited and performed internationally.

EAS Interests & Aspirations 

As someone who directly interacts and records land/ seascapes I am interested in how others practice investigate such spaces. My current work explores border spaces in flux including both the Irish and Cypriot border. Seeking to represent these spaces and understand how these borders function in the 21st century.  

Film of Interest’ for discussion - Bearing by Greg Marshall 

A phenomenological exploration of sites of drone attacks in Yemen via Google 360* photographs. 

https://fractofilm.com/2019-Selection-9

Adlais - a film made in the Dyffryn Nantlle Valley, Gwynedd Wales. It seeks to explore the visual and sonic potential of the now abandoned Dorothea and Pen-Yr-Orsedd Slate Quarries.

https://youtu.be/NzkJ02yDcwA

www.davoll.net 

James Loxley (University of Edinburgh) is Professor of Early Modern Literature in the Department of English Literature. He has published widely on early modern poetry and drama, on early modern philosophy, and on contemporary critical theory. Key publications include Ben Jonson’s Walk to Scotland: An Annotated Edition of the ‘Foot Voyage’, co-written with Anna Groundwater and Julie Sanders (Cambridge, 2015). He has a long standing interest in digital literary mapping and has been involved in recent years in two key projects in this area: firstly, LitLong.org, a digital literary map of Edinburgh as a site and setting for narrative writing, and secondly Chronotopic Cartographies, a project to map the imagined spaces and places of a range of literary works through Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the narrative ‘chronotope’. 

EAS Interests and Aspirations

Uniting my work on the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson’s walk between London and Edinburgh in the summer of 1618 and my literary mapping projects, the relationship between walking and writing is a key focus for current research. We are familiar with the ways in which the journal, or the story of a journey taken, can bring together travel and storytelling - the more than metaphorical (in some respects totalising) way in which a journey is a story and a story is a journey. My key interest is in the modes of experience which subtend this fusion. How, for example, might such experience be thought, mapped or marked other than in linear form? Is there more to the ambulant traveller than can be narrated? In what ways is the walking body essential to the traveller’s experience of place as meaningful, and as more or less than meaningful? How do the dynamics of writing <-> walking point towards, or bear the traces of, the expenditure of energy as that can be physiologically and phenomenologically described? If we try to think what is left out of the bivalent identification of story with journey, where exactly do we find ourselves?

Founder and Director of the ‘Centre for Trauma, Asylum and Refugees’, founder and Course Director of the MA and PhD in 'Refugee Care'. A member of the ‘Human Rights Centre’, of the ‘Transitional Justice Network’ and of the ‘Armed Conflict and Crisis Hub’ all at the University of Essex. Honorary Clinical Psychologist and Systemic Family Psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic. He is a practising Clinical Psychologist, Family Therapist and Jungian Psychoanalyst, who also has been involved in the training and supervision of these three specialists. As consultant to the United Nations and other organisations, he has been working with refugees, tortured persons and other survivors of political violence and disasters in many countries. He lectures and offers specialist trainings internationally and his writings have appeared in 16 languages. Recently, he was given Awards by the European Family Therapy Association for Life-time ‘Outstanding contribution to the field of Family Therapy and Systemic Practice’, by the University of Essex for the 'Best International Research Impact’, and by two Mexican Foundations for his ‘exceptional work with vulnerable children and families in Mexico’. 

Stella Mygdali is a registered architect, member of the Technical Chambers of Greece. She holds a PhD in Architecture and an MSc by Research in Architecture (Distinction) from the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on performative explorations of space and pedagogic practices across architecture, art, and psychoanalysis. She has experience in teaching history and theory at the University of Edinburgh (ESALA) and architectural design at the University of Newcastle (SAPL). She has presented her work in conferences and group exhibitions internationally.

My work focuses on the implications of an architect’s tools for their practice, exploring how computational methods may determine the limits of possibility, while seeking to re-construct them toward alternatives. I study the technical make-up of computers, and the manner in which contemporary practice hinges around the encoding of a building model, necessary to cast it as calculable, ‘computable’ problem. Through a reading of the nature of digitality and the materialisation of  its processes – particularly in terms of entanglement of the technical and cultural – I explore how previous manifestations of the digital may be gathered to form a critique of the present.  Drawing from these examples, I aim to construct alternative modes of computation toward indeterminate practices.

David Boyd is doing a PhD by Creative Practice in the School of Architecture at Newcastle University. He also teaches as a design studio tutor within the MArch programme. His research aims to scrutinise the philosophical roles and mechanisms of architectural representation within the cultural context of contemporary practice. It is designed to act as a space within which to practically explore differing representational modes of production, from traditional hand drawing, to industrially embedded modes of digital production. Studying Fine Art between 2002 - 2006,  he developed an interest in Russian constructivism and its influence on spatial design. He then studied Architecture at Newcastle University between 2010 - 2017, finally beginning both his PhD and teaching in 2019.

Dr Charlotte Veal holds a postdoctoral fellowship in Landscape in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University. Her interdisciplinary research crosscuts landscape studies, human geography, international relations, and performance studies. Charlotte’s previous research includes examining the role of political performances in spearheading novel responses to urban justice debates (published in Area, Geoforum, GeoHumanities) and the place of the arts within vertical warfare (published in Transactions of the IBG, Political Geography). Her current research responds to the unprecedented return of inter/national walls, fences, and separation barriers as nation states seek new strategies of security in a period of geopolitical turbulence. Charlotte is developing a creative geopolitics agenda for border cities through: i) extending liminality as a concept and a practice that exposes the messy in-betweenness of border landscapes as they are lived, embodied and felt; ii) spearheading performance-led methodologies for studying geopolitics and security; iii) exploring theories of choreography in the policing and securitisation of bodies at the border; and iv) investigating the role of dance performance in animating and contesting urban securitised borderscapes. Charlotte current sits on the Performance Network Steering Committee. 

Alec McCulloch and Mark Laverty are Masters students of Architecture at Newcastle University. Their current area of research is forensically analysing the charged domestic potential of the [dis]embodied experience within the home through an obsessive interrogation. 

Professor Richardson gained the world’s first PhD in Holographic Art from The Royal College of Art in 1988. In 1999 he was awarded the Millennium Fellowship, sponsored by the UK Government Commission, and in 2009 bestowed The Royal Photographic Society’s Medal in recognition for achievements and contributions to the advancement of holographic imaging, endowed by the late Graham Saxby Hon FRPS.  

Martin is regarded an imaging pioneer. He has made holograms of numerous celebrated people that include film directors Martin Scorsese and Alan Parker.  His work with rock star David Bowie is well known and documented in his book The Prime Illusion: Modern Holography in The New Age of Digital Media, ISBN 10: 0-9553210-0-X. He is currently Professor of Modern Holography at De Montfort University, Leicester, and head of The Holographic Research Group (HRG) in the faculty of Art, Design and Architecture.