Introduction: The Porous City
https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2020/02/introduction-porous-city/
Sabine Haenni introduces the roundtable with some reflections on the meanings of the porous and the historical origins of the idea of the porous city.
Porous Gateways: The London Docklands on Film and as Archive
Anna Viola Sborgi explores the varied history of London’s Docklands as a vector of threats to the empire, the loci of gentrification, and a space where the past opens into the present.
Liu Jiayin’s spatial politics of reduction
https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2020/02/liu-jiayins-spatial-politics-of-reduction/
Erin Shevaugn Schlumpf discusses Liu Jiayin’s documentary interiors in connection to Beijing’s porous, globalized space.
Apparitions and Wormholes: Moving Image Artworks and Urban Porosity
Annie Dell’Aria shows how illuminations and projections move through the fluid, living skin of the built environment, parting the boundaries between public and private space.
Feminist Protocols: Auditing Urban Infrastructures and Reporting Gender Violence in the City
Carrie Rentschler on feminist and anti-racist practices in the porous urban spaces and surfaces of chalking, graffiti, and postering.
Urban Pores as Media: Questions of Aesthetics and Access
https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2020/03/urban-pores-as-media-questions-of-aesthetics-and-access/
Sabine Haenni’s introduction to the second round explores pores as media, biology, and as form.
Activist Media and Distributional Aesthetics in the City
https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2020/03/activist-media-and-distributional-aesthetics-in-the-city/
Carrie Rentschler explores urban porosity via a feminist infrastructural focus on key points of transfer and transit in the city that activists target for change using a range of aesthetic and political strategies.
Screens in Public Space: Questions of Aesthetics and Access in a Moment of Social Distancing
Annie Dell’Aria discusses screen media’s potential to make both public space and private space—during times of social distancing—more porous.
No Exit, or Duration in Slow Cinema: Aesthetics of Femininity, Porosity, Security
Erin Schlumpf thinks through the spatial politics of slow cinema and orders to shelter in place.
From Water to Home: Permeability as Social Inclusion (and Exclusion) in Contemporary London
https://www.mediapolisjournal.com/2020/03/from-water-to-home/
Anna Viola Sborgi considers how recent documentary films reconfigure porosity as permeability, and reflects on questions of social inclusion in the city under lockdown.