Dr Charlotte Grace
- Tutor
- City Design MA
Charlotte works on the sociospatial dimensions of insurgency, identity, labour, logistics, empire, capital and the market.
Charlotte runs the theory module for MA City Design, Embodied Knowledge and Urban Struggle. The module explores the social and spatial dimensions of Marxist-Feminist, Post- and Decolonial thought, by looking at how these ideas are developed with and through grassroots political organisations. The module builds understanding on the intersecting conditions, perspectives and strategies that make up these struggles to develop situated approaches and frameworks for engagements with the MA's sites and subjects of research, namely those organising across Palestine and along migrant passages in Europe.
Charlotte has also taught theory for MA Environmental Architecture, fostering a similar methodological approach to ecological struggles, including mutual aid, environmental stewardship structures and decolonial New Deals.
She also curates the RCA SoA’s Public Lecture Series, bringing a range of speakers and discourses together under the themes of Reposession (21-22), Separation//Reparation (22-23) and Ascensions (23-24).
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Research interests
Charlotte works on the sociospatial dimensions of insurgency, identity, labour, logistics, empire, capital and the market. She is also interested in the kinds of visual methodologies solidarities that can support sociospatial emancipation, particularly in cartography, and collage.
Practice
Having graduated from study in the UK, Ahmedebad, Delft and Venice, Charlotte has spend over a decade involved in a range of grassroots sociospatial projects, from squatting and occupations, to off-grid cooperative housing development, to community-led design & construction.
Professionally, she has worked for Cooking Sections on the politics of food and resource extraction, Novara Media on visual and spatial direction, and muf architecture/art on feminist and socially-engaged spatial interventions. She has also taught Design Studio and Media Studies, History/Theory courses at Brookes University, Goldsmiths University and Central St Martins School of Art, and Spatial Humanities at the University of Rojava.
Current and recent projects
Charlotte recently completed a PhD on the ongoing revolution in Rojava, Kurdistan, looking at the ways in which reproductive (spatial) labour contribute to revolutionary practice in everyday life. In exploring these issues she has developed co-pedagogical frameworks and visual techniques that speak to the ecological, decolonial (and) feminist principles of the revolution itself.
She has recently written for Arch+, The Funambulist, Horizonte Magazine and Effects journal, the Kurdish Studies Journal.
She has spoken for the Open City Foundation, Ljubljana Graphic Arts Biennale, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Architectural Humanities Research Association and Colonial and Post-colonial Landscapes Association.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Grace, C. and Clemoes, C., 2019. Next Hype : The Taking and Making of Space in the 2010 UK Protest Movement, Funambulist Magazine
Cooking Sections, 2019. Offsetted, Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Columbia GSAPP, New York
Cooking Sections, 2019. Empire Remains Shop Birmingham, Grand Union Gallery, Birmingham
Hi-Vis Feminist Architecture Collective, 2018. The Gendering of the Architecture Competition, in Tne Architecture Grid : Experimenting with and within Architecture competitions, ed. Theodoru, M. and Katsakou, A.
Grace, C., 2015. The Architecture of the Barricade, Horizonte Magazine, Bauhaus Weimar.