Charlotte Grace
- Tutor
- City Design MA
Charlotte works on the sociospatial dimensions of insurgency, identity, labour, logistics, empire, capital and the market.
Charlotte currently leads the theory component of RCA's MA City Design course and curates the School of Architecture's Public Lecture Series.
Entitled 'Embodied Knowledges and Urban Struggles', City Design's theory course looks at Marxist-Feminist, Abolitionist, Post- and Decolonial Thought as-seen by and through political organisation. Exploring the intersecting conditions, perspectives and subjectivities that shape our environments, atmospheres and horizons, the course aims to develop critical solidarity frameworks that are capable of actively supporting the sites, subjects and agents of emancipatory change - namely, the MA’s studio focus on Palestine and migrant passages in the Alps - while remaining mindful both the affordances and limitations of institutionalised knowledge production across the sociospatial disciplines.
Charlotte also teaches theory for MA Environmental Architecture, with a similar approach to ecological issues, mutual aid / kinship structures and the Green- and Red New Deals as-manifest through movements for climate justice.
Through the RCA SoA Public Lecture Series, Charlotte has brought a range of thinkers, practitioners and discourses together under the themes of Reposession (21–22) and Separation//Reparation (22–23), including Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, Eyal Weizman, Tonika Johnson, Marco Armiero, Jonas Staal and the revolutionary University of Rojava, among others.
Key details
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Research interests
Charlotte’s Interests are rooted in the spatial dimensions of sociopolitical movements, and the embodied knowledge that emerges from them.
She is also interested in developing the kinds of socio-spatial methodologies and solidarities that enable these movements to thrive in a mututalist, co-educational and emancipatory way.
Practice
Having graduated from study in the UK, Ahmedebad, Delft and Venice, Charlotte has worked for Cooking Sections on the politics of food and resource extraction, Novara Media on visual and spatial direction, and muf architecture/art on feminist and socially-engaged spatial interventions. She has also taught Design Studio and Media Studies and History/Theory courses at Brookes University, Goldsmiths University and Central St Martins School of Art.
While her work is currently focussed on sociopolitical theories of architecture and urbanism, she has been involved in a range of practice-based grassroots projects, from squatting and occupations, to off-grid cooperative housing construction, to leftist media set design, to canal boat-building.
Current and recent projects
Currently, she is completing a PhD on the ongoing revolution in Rojava, Kurdistan, exploring the spaces of localised struggle and internationalist solidarity, read as a from of reproductive (spatial) labour. In exploring these issues she has been developing co-pedagogical frameworks and representational techniques that speak to the ecological, decolonial (and) feminist principles of the revolution itself.
She has recently written for Arch+ The Funambulist, Horizonte Magazine and Effects journal.
Publications, exhibitions, other outcomes
Grace, C. and Clemoes, C., 2019. Next Hype : The Taking and Making of Space in the 2010 UK Protest Movement, Funambulist Magazine
Cooking Sections, 2019. Offsetted, Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Columbia GSAPP, New York
Cooking Sections, 2019. Empire Remains Shop Birmingham, Grand Union Gallery, Birmingham
Hi-Vis Feminist Architecture Collective, 2018. The Gendering of the Architecture Competition, in Tne Architecture Grid : Experimenting with and within Architecture competitions, ed. Theodoru, M. and Katsakou, A.
Grace, C., 2015. The Architecture of the Barricade, Horizonte Magazine, Bauhaus Weimar.