Orienting Imagination: What are the stakes on the Llano Estacado?
Texas Tech Art & Architecture Symposium
January 31 & February 1, 2025
Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, Lubbock, Texas
SYMPOSIUM OVERVIEW
Orienting Imagination calls for tangible and intangible interventions addressing reciprocity, communication, and interdependent positionings between us and the lands in which we find ourselves.
For centuries, religious and political structures have been erected and oriented toward a heavenly cosmos. While orientation—operating as a primordial directedness before phenomenal experience—was foundational in pre-modern architecture and art, the modern age saw a loss of this grounding and an intensified disorientation, perpetuated by neoliberal urbanization, the climate crisis, capitalist globalization, and injustice and disembodiment of place. However, since the 1960s and 70s, movements and scholarship such as global land art, planetary Anthropocene, and site-specificity have sought to revisit the fundamental question of orientation.
Orienting Imagination asks contributors to redefine orientation and activate these discussions front and center. If orientation is “a dimensional order” that “amounts to a sacrifice of the individual building’s freestanding self-governance” (David Leatherbarrow), should art, objects, constructions, words, and architecture be oriented within and toward a specific locality? Does equitable design and production require orientation of identities, resources, energy, and labor? If the upright heterosexual body has for too long shaped the contours of ordinary lived experience (Sara Ahmed), how might queer sexual orientations—understood as a matter of residence, redirect and reroute our inhabitation of different worlds? If orientation is to shift and preserve the human condition amid anthropogenic climate change (Dipesh Chakrabarty), how might we reorient experiences of land and environment through art, architecture, and interventions at varying degrees and scales that advocate for more inclusive and ethical inhabitable and performative space? How should we orient ourselves in the Llano Estacado, and—crucially—does this region offer lessons for planetary re-orientation?
This is a CALL for students, faculty, and researchers from across Texas Tech University as well as independent scholars and practitioners in art and architecture, landscape architecture, urban design, planning, policy-making, healthcare, and law-making from the Llano Estacado community and beyond, to submit proposals to participate in critical, urgent, and necessary investigations of our collective imagination to help orient and reorient ourselves within the lands in which we dwell.
This symposium is particularly interested in projects that focus on the land, built environments, and phenomenological horizons of the Llano Estacado. Presentations for the symposium can be in the form of scholarly essays, design projects (built or unbuilt), construction projects, bodies of visual artwork, art installations, film or video projects, performances, and the like.
Call for Submissions:
Your submission of a maximum of a 250-word abstract about your presentation can be uploaded to this GOOGLE DRIVE FORM by November 1, 2024.
If your proposed presentation involves creative visual art research, (in addition to the abstract) submit a PDF of 10 artworks in which information about each artwork is listed (i.e., title, year made, medium, and dimensions height x width x depth in inches).
For film, video, and performance presentations: (in addition to the abstract) submit a web-link (URL) to a relevant online teaser of your presentation, not to exceed 5 minutes in duration.
Selected presenters will be allocated 30 minutes for their presentations.
Targeted Topics:
Art + Architecture: After Drought
Building Community/Breaking Down Walls
Body and Embodiment
Anthropogenic Climate Change
Infrastructure
Decolonization
Democracy and Public Space
Extraction and Capitalism
Gender and Sexual Orientation
Gentrification
Geodesign
Horizontality
Pedagogy
Wind + Sun: Salvation and/or Death
SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE
§ Open Call for Contributions: September 16, 2024
§ Deadline for Submissions: November 1, 2024
§ Notice of Acceptance: December 1, 2024
§ Review, Presentation Selection, and Organizing of Panels and Sessions: December 2 – 22, 2024
§ Moderator Assignments: December 31, 2024 – January 15, 2025
§ Symposium: January 31 and February 1, 2025, in the Firehouse Theatre of the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts
SYMPOSIUM STEERING & REVIEW COMMITTE
Ke Sun, Texas Tech University, Huckabee College of Architecture
Joe Arredondo, Texas Tech University, Director, Landmark Arts in the School of Art
Chris Taylor, Texas Tech University, Director, Land Arts of the American West
Kevin Chua, Texas Tech University, School of Art
Natalie Hegert, Texas Tech University, School of Art; Arts Editor, Southwest Contemporary