The multiplicity of mediums used by Erin Manning to address the Spinozist question of “what can a body do” certainly influences this conversation and its “start from the middle,” a Deleuzian notion of which she is particularly fond. Through fashion design, literature, dance and philosophy, we repeatedly explore how little we know of the body. This ignorance is however balanced by our certitude that all design/politics that consider the body in a normative manner rather than in its singularity will indubitably hurt it rather than work with it. Erin Manning holds a University Research Chair in Relational Art and Philosophy in ...

In this conversation, Mahmoud Keshavarz and I talk about our common interest for the way the designed environment (in particular objects) unfolds a violence to the bodies that it hosts, as well as the potential political actions that can be undertook through design. Mahmoud’s work being particularly focused on the facilitated or obstructed fluxes of migration, we discuss at length the politics of objects that regulate them, the passport in particular, but also the charter flight that implements the expulsion of a body from a given territory. We speak of the regime of invisibility of the violence in which the ...

This conversation I had with Michael Badu, evolves around his architectural practice that mostly consists in the design of mosques in Europe. We talk about his “funambulism,” trying to find his ethical equilibrium between the recurrent ostracism facing a practicing Muslim in Western societies—although Michael does not talk too much about it—and the conservatism of some of his religious clients. But this conversation happens to be primarily an architectural one, where we wonder about the architect’s dilemma about what can be accepted as a commission and for which reason. Similarly to essential questions, this one cannot be categorically answered. Michael Badu ...

The title of this conversation with Francisco Díaz recorded in Santiago is the one he chose for the conference/book he co-organized/edited. The provocative question Who Cares for Chilean Cities? attempts to address the paradox of a high-quality of private architecture that does not contribute to the design of the country’s cities. Throughout this conversation, Francisco introduces the politics of space at work in Chilean cities, in particular in the capital city, Santiago. Spatial segregation between the upper social classes and the lower ones is manifest between the Western and Eastern parts of the city. We talk about urban interventions that provided an interesting debate ...

This conversation is the last one from the series of podcasts recorded on the US/Canadian West Coast. Kamal Arora brings us to Delhi where the research for her dissertation is set. From an introduction about female bodies navigating at risk in the public space, we focus more specifically on one space, called ‘the widow colony.’ The widows are women who saw their husbands killed during the 1984 massacre against the Sikh population consequently from the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi. Together, we examine how the physicality of this urban village partially determine the politics of its daily organization and ...

Black Anarchism Zoé Samudzi is a writer and doctoral candidate in Medical Sociology at the University of California, San Francisco. She is co-author of As Black as Resistance (AK Press 2018).