Actions for an Emancipatory Faith

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Actions for an emancipatory faith is a temporary and open-ended installation popped-up in Slocum Hall, the heart of Syracuse University School of Architecture.

 

Actions for an emancipatory faith is intended to be the first of a series of participatory actions designed in order to foster the engagement of students, faculty and staff to build a spontaneous and interactive reflection about several key topics that are shaping contemporary architectural production.

 

Using one of the Slocum Hall atrium’s columns as a “structural and conceptual” core, this low-resolution-pagoda-like-pagan-multi-altar explores the role of “faith” as emancipatory tool in the construction of our consolidated beliefs, and incidentally, aims to open up a debate about the potentialities and implications of precariousness in architecture.

Over the years, altars have been made for wholehearted tribute, but paradoxically, this one provides room for criticism and participation, questioning the status of the concepts to which it is devoted.

Despite being already prepopulated with different kinds of discursive elements/formats generated through our research process, everyone is invited to contribute with new ones to create a collaborative installation that, above all, seeks to reflect on the loss of meaning and its recovery.

 

Actions for an emancipatory faith constitutes a preliminary and crucial part of Standardizing Diversity, an ongoing research supported by the Syracuse University School of Architecture and led by Assistant Professor Marcos Parga with the collaboration of M. Arch students Kathi Koerber, Christina Fluman and Ruwaida Albawab.

 

This preliminary stage implies rummaging around common places and revisiting over and over again concepts such as participation, sustainability, rawness, decoding, system or toolbox, in an attempt to convert them into operational tools and thus moving towards the activation of more precise terms like systematic disorder, ready-rough, hyper-sustainability or neo-plasticity.

 

Actions for an emancipatory faith will be displayed and open for participation from Tuesday, April 9th to Friday, April 12th, 2019.

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Year: 2019 / Location: Syracuse, NY / Program: Spatial Installation