Episode 169: A Conversation About Urban Choreography — with Justine A. Chambers, Alana Gerecke & Annabel Vaughan

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Taking gesture as a point of entry, Justine A. Chambers and Alana Gerecke extend their collaborative exploration of the everyday choreographies that are built into an urban experience. Combining artistic and academic research, they index the various bodily orientations cultivated by the built and social structures that shape everyday spaces. By tracking an archive of everyday gestures that are prompted by various components of built and social space, they insist on the lasting and vital information contained within those specific organizations of moving bodies. They emphasize the significance of embodied knowledge—even, or especially, as it lives in invisibilized daily gestures. 

In this discussion, Chambers and Gerecke are joined by architect Annabel Vaughan. Together, the panelists explore the accumulation of living archival gestures generated by the interactions between moving bodies and built space, an evolving assembly of lost gestures. This public conversation was presented with the aim of sharing evolving research by inviting those present to engage in a consideration of the embodied details of urban circulation.

Annabel Vaughan

She received her Master of Architecture from The School of Architecture at the University of British Columbia, where her master’s thesis examined the use of heritage buildings as mnemonic devices for the collective memory of cities and their public lives. 

Annabel joined ERA Architects in 2015 after two decades in Vancouver, including 10 years at Birmingham & Wood where she was involved in all aspects of design and construction, including the award-winning Mountain View Cemetery. A project that revitalized an important cultural heritage landscape in the middle of the city. Her professional work includes heritage conservation, small-scale landscape architecture insertions, civic and residential building design, urban design and research, performance art lectures, and curatorial projects.

She writes, teaches and participates regularly in discussions concerning the role that architecture and public art can play as agents of political change in the city.