CA2RE Conference Hannover – Trajectories

The Hannover CA2RE Conference places Trajectories at the centre of discussion.

We want to investigate its relevance for research and spatial transformation, and discover new approaches, perspectives and processes within design-driven research. How do we navigate our research paths, creating settings that allow research and practice to intersect? Why and at which points do we change the course, pose new questions and follow different directions? How do we enter states of movement and flow – circulating, moving, coming and going? Trajectories explores fields of research across architecture and design while highlighting alternative ways of working and re-connecting thinking and making as a distinct form of knowledge production.

Trajectories, from the Latin trans–iacere (to throw across), refer to the move to further dimensions, thinking and creating beyond what first-hand appears and what is practiced, concerning the spin to transmit and transport understanding, knowing and practising. To discuss paths of research – as it moves – points at finding logics and coherence, for the course over time, seen as a curve, tracing in space and context, for cutting other curves, passing through a set of points, and identifying rules which steer the research process. With Trajectories of design-driven and artistic research we aim to shed light on the intersection of research processes with spatial change. How can spatial capacities and their transformation be grasped, related to theory and shown in research? In which way can material- or concept-based spatial interventions become a practical part of research? What role can the creation of space and projection of existing spaces towards the future play for research in architecture?

“To throw across” – Trajectories can be about the risk and adventure in design-driven and artistic research, to engage with uncertainties, to move to something new and unknown, towards emerging directions, to move from and to horizons of knowledge (Gadamer, 1990), getting aware of conditioning skills, practices and concepts and how they can be contested, reworked, and extended. Thus, finding “curved lines” driven by a spin, necessarily involves learning processes, trial and error, using also discarded lines to identify more complex lines of thought and practice. Tracking Trajectories, in this sense, is about how practices are followed, drawn, and documented, considering the legitimacy of more intuitive, drifting approaches (Krogh, Markussen, and Bang, 2015) and setting an equal focus on the research process and its outcome. Trajectories are simultaneously pointing forwards and backwards, for a prospective as well as a retroactive reflection.

„Lines of flight” – Trajectories can be, at the same time, about a performative view on space, its capacities, tendencies, and the agencies involved in its transformation – across architectural, urban, territorial, natural, interior, and more dimensions – to invent, experiment, and evolve pathways in understanding spatial change. Understanding Trajectories as part of assemblage thinking can respond to dynamic spatial as well as research contexts, and to social and material networks of people, things, and narratives. As Deleuze and Guattari (1980) point out, Trajectories are able to frame complexity through fluidity and connectivity, constantly shifting, evolving, and adapting – concerned with material forms and forms of expression, with territorialisation for ordering and creating space and context, and with coding/decoding (De Landa, 2016) to different languages and contexts of meaning.

Trajectories are taking up on the work of the CA2RE community on strategies (Pedersen et al., 2021). Trajectories of research are about the persons imagining and forming them, their personal paths, collaboration and interaction in new forms of understanding and organising research. To actively form, steer and adjust Trajectories of research processes, at different points, can enhance and promote specific characteristics of design-driven and artistic research. For example, to create iterative and recursive moves, in defining start and end, research questions, results, and relevance, or to design courses that address how to move across methods, fields of research, meanings, and concepts. Trajectories of space thus are about spatial capacities and transformation, its social, spatial and historic change, cultural resources, material matters, context-based, human and ephemeral experiences and creative heritage. They are based within the material but go far beyond, lingering into fields of interdisciplinarity, collective conversations, visual languages and theoretical reflection.

The invitation to the CA2RE conference in Hannover was an invitation to share space and time at an ongoing construction site. We would like to thank Prof. Anette Haas and the kug-Team for hosting us in their premises – the sculpture hall, the drawing room, the courtyard – and for contributing with “Transmission –kug workshop insights” to the conference. Looking back on the rich days in Hannover, a Thank you to Enrico Miglietta and Liselotte Vroman with Thierry Lagrange, Jo Van Den Berghe for the kick-off with the workshop “Trajectory · Punctum” and to the keynote speakers Sabine Hansmann, Irati Irulegi and Ramón Parramon for the opening dialogue. Many thanks to the presenters for sharing their research and thoughts. Thanks to the reviewers and respondents and to the whole CA2RE-community, especially to the authors of the essays, visual essays, dialogues and reflections in this book. We are grateful to the „Niedersächsiches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur” for co-funding the conference. Thanks to Stina Wellmann and Helena Reinhardt whose active support made this conference possible.

We hope that these conference proceedings bring together what we experienced throughout the two days and that it gives new ideas, initiates dialogues and thoughts and contributes to ongoing debates on Trajectories in artistic and architectural research.