With Jesko Fezer, Julika Gittner, Saskia O’Hara, Claire Louise Staunton.
Consultation (Counter) Cultures is a two-part event series that critically evaluates the failure of public consultations in the context of urban renewal and the role that cultural practitioners can play in its transformation.
This event examines the systemic inadequacies that individuals and groups experience as part of public consultation processes. The speakers will share examples from their practices of law, design and art, each of which support residents to better represent themselves when facing social and spatial injustices. Coming together as a panel they will consider if cultural practices have the potential to enable structural change in public engagement.
Jesko Fezer works as a designer and is professor of Experimental Design at HFBK Hamburg. Since 2011, the Studio in Experimental Design has been offering weekly support sessions to people in the neighbourhood of St. Pauli who for economic or socio-cultural reasons, do not have access to or are prevented from wielding the agency of design. In these weekly consultations, students pick up requests from local residents and work together with them to address the everyday problems they bring.
Julika Gittner practices and teaches across the disciplines of art and architecture. Her sculpture, performance and video works materialise and dissect the relationship between human activity, bureaucratic processes and social justice. Her practice-based PhD in art and architecture investigated the role of sculpture as a visual method of representing data as counter evidence to support social housing campaigns in London. She is currently holding a 12-month senior research fellowship at the Helmholtz Centre for Sustainability in Potsdam where she is developing sculptures as alternative forms for communicating knowledge in public consultation processes.
Saskia O’Hara manages PILC’s Gentrification Project: Supporting access to justice in the class-based transformation of urban space and has worked on public law challenges across London including opposing demolition of estates, protection of community green space and assets, and challenging the conditions of families in temporary and overcrowded accommodation. Saskia has been active in grassroots community campaigns for 15 years across Glasgow and London, playing leading roles in housing, anti-austerity, Palestinian human-rights campaigns. She is a strategy group member of Focus E15 housing campaign which was founded in 2013, active in Newham, East London.
Chaired by Claire Louise Staunton who is a curator, researcher and organiser. As Research Fellow at Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art/Teesside University, her expanded research practice addresses the intersection between art, politics and housing. She has held curatorial/directorship positions at MK Gallery, Flat Time House, Inheritance Projects and completed her PhD at the RCA in 2022.
