Lectures
Jonathan Mills
Artists and communities—performing the city
How do we respond to the intimate details of our surroundings? Our homes, or streets? Our neighborhoods and offices? Our urban, or, decreasingly, our rural environments? Driving through a city, a town, a neighborhood, even within speed limits, how much do we really notice? Are the textures and assemblages of buildings and streetscapes, landmarks and landscapes, ever more than fleeting glances? Are we doing anything other than passing through? Do we truly inhabit or celebrate the places in which we work, love, or play? What kind of sensory relationships exist within these familiar places? Do we perform, through ritual or reverie, consciously or intuitively, simple acts of recognition to reflect upon and evoke the places in which we live – and how those places and spaces transform over time? Jonathan Mills explores the idea of performance as a way in which we might want to inhabit and reimagine our place in the world.