Public Program
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The Funambulist ConversationsLéopold Lambert and Shivangi Mariam Raj
Organizers -
GRANTEE
The FunambulistGRANT YEAR
2024
Madlener House
4 West Burton Place
Chicago, Illinois 60610
Telephone: 312.787.4071
info@grahamfoundation.org
“‘The Funambulist’ in the streets,” 2023. Digital photograph. Courtesy a generous reader
The Funambulist has facilitated a critical range of pioneering approaches to and conversations with the architectural discipline and attempts to make its resources as accessible as possible—the podcasts, editorial projects, and 42 out of the 52 magazine issues published to date are available online for no charge. With this new initiative, The Funambulist deepens its engagement by training other practitioners in their local settings and sharing our experience and expertise in publishing and architecture. Through The Funambulist Conversations, the platform becomes physically present in some of the geographies not yet mobilized in its pages, to contribute to the discursive contexts that shape their political environments. Thus, this effort strengthens the distribution, ease of access, and usefulness of Funambulist resources for individuals and collectives from a multitude of socioeconomic backgrounds, who will not only utilize them for their struggles but will also shape, rearticulate, and nourish them.
Léopold Lambert is the editor-in-chief of The Funambulist. He is a trained architect, as well as the author of four books that examine the inherent violence of architecture on bodies, and its political instrumentalization at various scales and in various geographical contexts. He is the author of Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona, 2012); Topie Impitoyable: The Corporeal Politics of the Cloth, the Wall, and the Street (punctum, 2016); La politique du Bulldozer: La ruine palestinienne comme projet israélien (B2, 2016); and States of Emergency: A Spatial History of the French Colonial Continuum (Premiers Matins de Novembre, 2021).
Shivangi Mariam Raj is a writer from Delhi/Uttar Pradesh, India. As an independent researcher, she is interested in visual cultures of majoritarian violence across South Asia, language as the site of caste apartheid in India, and spectral temporalities as forms of resistance in Kashmir. She utilizes essays, poetry, and reportage for individual memory to coalesce into a broader inquiry of the politics of public remembering. She is the 2024–25 development editor fellow for Logic(s) Magazine through Incite at Columbia University and she serves as the head of communications at The Funambulist.
The Funambulist, established in 2015, is a platform that engages with the politics of space and bodies. It does not understand architecture as an authored design of inhabitable sculptures, but rather as a discipline that organizes bodies in space. With this perspective, The Funambulist has attempted to formulate spatial approaches to anticolonial, antiracist, anticapitalist, queer, trans, and feminist struggles in the hope to create a platform where activist, academic, and practitioner voices can build solidarities across geographical scales. Through essays, epistolary exchanges, interviews, artworks, and design projects, The Funambulist is assembling an ongoing archive for these multitudes of struggles.
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