Critical Spatial Practice

In My Mothers’ Garden: Memories and practices of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (2016)
  • Nick Beech | London

  • Nicholas Beech
  • In My Mothers’ Garden: Memories and practices of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (2016)
  • Nick Beech | London
  • ‘Sitting by the fire is grown up, and you are not a grown up if you run around trying to avoid the smoke, which gets in your eyes, and in your lungs, and on your teeth.’


    What sounds, spaces, textures, affects and emotions are recalled by a 40-year old, of his seven-year old self? This work is an attempt at presenting a seven-year old self, living at Greenham Common with his mother during school holidays.


    Biography

    Nick Beech completed his PhD, ‘The Construction of Everyday Life: an architectural history of the South Bank in Production, 1948–1951’, under the supervision of Jane Rendell and Peg Rawes (Bartlett, UCL, 2010), following completion of a Masters in Architectural History which included the Critical Spatial Practice module run by Rendell. Nick now engages in research examining the formation of the New Left in Britain, exploring urban, architectural and broader critical spatial practices engaged by the New Left in the mid-twentieth century, as well as political, material and cultural processes that affected London’s history in the twentieth century (particularly during the 1940s). He continues to collaborate with Katie Lloyd Thomas and Tilo Amhof exploring ways in which the history and theories of architecture might be reconsidered through an emphasis on its embeddedness within material production (see, for example, Katie Lloyd Thomas, Tilo Amhof and Nick Beech (eds), Industries of Architecture (London: Routledge, 2016). Nick enjoys teaching architectural history, particularly the architectural history of London.


    Practices

    I like to think that critical spatial practice was a significant discovery (but not in the usual colonialist sense—no room for further elaboration here). I dare to suppose that my work shares in the fruits of that discovery, as I try to show how critical spatial practice is evident in all kinds of works, places, and biographies, past and present. I understand it as potentially counter-hegemonic, and as a spatial counter-point, for instance, to Raymond Williams’ proposal for a study of ‘structures of feeling’.


    Keywords
    Memory, Trauma, Boundary, Greenham Common, Subject formation, Peace movement/s

    References

    Stuart Hall with Bill Schwarz, Familiar Stranger: A life between two islands (London: Allen Lane, 2017).

    Katie Lloyd Thomas, ‘Going Into the Mould: Materials and process in the architectural specification’, Radical Philosophy, vol. 144 (July/August 2007), 16–25.

    Jane Rendell, ’She is walking about in a town she doesn’t know’, catalogue essay for Elles sont passées par ici, Brittany (Loquivy de la Mer), France, (2005).


    Other projects
  • Visible vs Invisible, (2022–)
  • Naisten Kaupunki – Työkaluja oman tilan valtaamiseen, (City of Women — Tools for Occupying Space) (2022) 
  • Moonfuture: Migration, Images and the Geological Interior (2022)
  • Dissolving the Dwelling (2021–2)
  • Washing White (2021)
  • Um Slaim Collective (2021)
  • Sonic Acts of Noticing (2021)
  • MGM_OurStarterCulture_5
    Our Starter Culture, (2021)
  • Milan Gender Atlas, (2021)
  • Making Map I: Animals and Anachronistic Architectures, development in progress (2021–)
  • Collateral (2021)
  • The Wandsworth Food Bus, (2020)
  • Progetto Minore. Alla ricerca della minorità nel progetto archiettonico ed urbanistico (2020)
  • 1-DMZ
    Architecture and Co-Existence: DMZ as Site, (2020)
  • Time on Site (2019)
  • Stori Mwd (A Story of Mud), (2019)
  • not nothing (August 2019)
  • Hungry Mothers, En La Frontera (2019 – present)
  • Exchanging Values at Bank (18 October 2019)
  • Cybiog: locating the digital self, (2019/20, 2 mins 45 secs)
  • Civic Pedagogy, learning as critical spatial practice (2019)
  • An Independent and Flexible and Precarious and Overworked Rehearsal, (January – December 2019)
  • An environmental history of La Guajira (2019)
  • A Weird-Tender in progress (2019)
  • Cecilie Sachs Olsen
    A walk in your words (25.01.2019)
  • Portal Zaryadye: A Portal Not Only to Heaven, But Aslo To Hell (24 July – 12 August 2018)
  • Text-isles: sowing an idea, October (2018)
  • Gilly-image-1
    Silent Conversation, (2018 – ongoing)
  • Objects removed for study (2018)
  • Female Futures Lexicon on Space (2018/2019)
  • 5, Big Bang 2 / Mid Graemetruby
    Bank Job, (2018–2020 and beyond)
  • Natalia Irina Roman, Tick Tack, Berlin (2019). Photographer: Natalia Irina Roman
    Along the Lines (2018–)
  • windwoundweatherwovenwirewoman [performance] (2017)
  • Viscous Myths (2017/2018)
  • The Pass (October 2017 – June 2018)
  • The House Alice Built (2017/2019)
  • Productive Withdrawals: Art Strikes, Art Worlds, and Art as a Practice of Freedom (December 2017)
  • Request for the unrequested voluntary interlinguisticality (2017)
  • Caring for Communities (2017 – 2019)
  • Bodies + Borders (2017 – present)
  • a place called … (Spring 2017)
  • Uppland (2016 – 18)
  • Music for Masterplanning (2016 – 17)
  • P | A | N – Proyecto Amasandería Nacional (2016)
  • Make Me Yours: How Art Seduces (2016)
  • Island Icarus (2016–2019)
  • In My Mothers’ Garden: Memories and practices of Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp (2016)
  • Having not felt like eating, but eaten, I sat down to eat / tea … (2016)
  • Desiring the Dark: Feminist Scenographies, the City and the Night, (2016–2019)
  • Bamboo dialogues (2016)
  • ASSET ARREST (2016)
  • Alternative Arrangements: Walking the Border in Ireland (2016 – ongoing)
  • Matter of the Manor (2015 – 19)
  • The First World Congress of the Missing Things (2014)
  • Private Choices, Public Spaces (2014)
  • Hanging Matters (2014)
  • Act#5 & Act#6: What does Mai Mai Mean? (March 2014 – December 2016)
  • 03-FLATS (2014)
  • (small memorials), 2013–15
  • Mount Patawerta
    Gardening for Untold Ecologies: A Manual for Making an Arid GARDEN Out There, (2013)
  • A Game of Dominoes (2013)
  • Lina & Gio: the last humanists (February – June 2012)
  • Learning-through-Touring (2012)
  • Empty Words Build Empty Homes (2012)
  • Ridley’s (2011)
  • Hustadt project, 2008 – (2011)
  • Palimpsest Performances (2010 – 2014)
  • Negotiating Conflict: Bordering Practices in a Divided Beirut (2010 – 2014)
  • Expanded Architecture (2010 – 2014)
  • Unfixing Place: A Study of Istanbul through Topographical Practices (2008)
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