Micaela Terk
Wandering as Research Method

2023-Present

Workshop

This workshop offers wandering and loitering as ethnographic research tools to explore what architecture, choreography, and the senses hold in common. Participants are invited to use their bodies as receptors, wandering through public space under a pedestrian disguise. The premise of the workshop is that space is a non-neutral thing: saturated with nonverbal cues, power dynamics, and collectivity. Prompts adapted from movement and performance studies support tuning into the spaces within, in-between, and around us. Participants will experiment with improvisation as a tactic for imagining otherwise. Social choreographies (Hewitt) will be disobeyed as understandings, uses, and abuses of public space will be reflected on. Research findings will be documented through subjective mapping and experiential writing techniques.


This workshop may support architects and urban designers who wish to better understand the sensory, choreographic, and social impacts of design decisions; or organizational teams researching non-verbal, socio-spatial dyanamics. All exercises may be adapted for different mobility ranges and energy levels.



On Wandering and Loitering


Wandering is a movement that invites slowing down and resisting circulation. Walking without goal or direction invites us to tune inwards, and consider sensory data that surrounds us on a daily basis. Wandering helps us observe and document public space beyond what meets the eye, at both street level and from a bird's eye view.


Loitering is an illegalized movement of doing nothing, or moving otherwise. It invites us to expand beyond everyday social choreographies, to move in ways that are unpredictable, unexpected, and unaccepted (Lepecki, Choreopolicing and Choreopolitics).

Diagram from workshop at the Unit for Civil Architecture, July 2024

Wandering Workshop at The School, Hasselt, July 2023

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Workshop at A—Z Presents, Berlin, November 2023

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Relatively, Speaking ( ⤌ )

( ⤍ ) Digestive Writing Scores
( c ) 2019

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