CALL FOR ABSTRACTS
Interior Provocations Symposium 2020: Memory
The fourth annual Interior Provocations symposium, Memory, held at the Ryerson School of Interior Design on March 28, 2020 and co-hosted with Pratt Institute, seeks papers addressing the broad cultural, historical, and theoretical implications of memory with regard to the practice and scholarship of interior design. Memories, both individual and collective, conspire to give the interior its central place in our collective and individual experiences. Interior memories can be somatic, semantic, and can be measured; they spun from scents, sounds, textures, traces, and visual cues as well as from more structured, text-based knowledge. As such, interiors offer a unique entry point in grappling with, as well as challenging, questions of memory precisely because both memory and interiors exceed that which can be named and, instead, move towards that which can only be experienced. Scholars and designers both have attempted to capture the ways in which memories mutually activate and constitute interior spaces, which function as infinitely transformable, time traveling vessels of memory and experience.
This conference encourages provocative and boundary-expanding proposals from design practitioners, historians, and theorists addressing, for example, the ways in which the somatic experience of interior spaces forms deep personal memories rooted in experience; the ways in which interiors might challenge the agreed- upon past to help us remember more inclusively and to explore alternative forms of recollection; how the diversity of collective memories spatially implicate and are implicated by spaces of historical significance and how these memories continue to (re)active and (re)frame these spaces as they shift over time; how memories can be articulated materially and spatially, including how these memories accrue in layers waiting to be excavated; and the ways in which interiors and interior furnishings can work to create and keep secrets.
Proposals will be accepted according to two streams:
– History/theory
– Praxis/theory
Indicate in your email subject and on your abstract whether your paper should be considered history/theory or praxis/theory.
Please submit abstracts with original, unpublished research of no more than 300 words and a 2-page cv as well as up to three images to:
interiorprovocations@gmail.com by December 15, 2019, 9:00pm EST
Dependent upon the number of entries, a poster session will also be held. Please indicate in your abstract if you would like to be considered for this session only.
Please check the website for updates to Memory