Embodying Land Values

MA Situated Practice is a platform for developing creative projects that are situated physically and engage with contemporary social, cultural, economic, environmental and political conditions. This practice-led transdisciplinary course questions the role of the public practitioner and explores a critical spatial practice across art, architecture, performance, writing and urbanism.Situated Practice: Live presents a sequence of moments through which practitioners share their work with the public. Visitors are invited to participate in immersive performances, attend screenings, hear readings, share stories and contribute to workshops and discussions. The series of events are free to attend and open to all.

Situated Practice: Live

The live intervention is a movement piece which aims to measure the value of the land through embodied human body rhythms

Bank of England

With an aim to derive the highest economic value from a piece of land, an intentionally obfuscated language is used by the profit-driven real estate developer for explaining land value calculations. This language creates blind spots which are then used by the developer as opportunities to distort the projected values of land. The effects of these distorted land values are seen in the form of extortionate rents which are destroying the way human life is organized and the cities we live in built.This practice-led research suggests that ‘Rent’ as a product of a certain economic rhythm has an effect on human body rhythms. Thus, the extortionate rents are made visible on the site of the human body movement as we start to move at a pace which is unnatural to our bodies in our everyday lives. This is seen most explicitly in a financial center like the Bank junction where the natural human body rhythms have been morphed to respond to the distorted market prices created by the developer.Framing human body rhythm as a field of knowledge through which ‘value’ can be known, the project aims to find an alternative language to know value so that the illusions created by the obfuscating developer language can be de-mystified. Human body rhythm gives us an alternative to purely mathematical models of calculation and measure therefore revealing an alternative reading of ‘value’.This project builds upon the theoretical framework of Marxist Philosopher Henri Lefevre’s conception of space and overlays it on Jacques Lecoq’s research into the human body’s movement as having the ability to know things which the mind is ignorant of. It aims to use human movement to reveal an alternative measure of the value of land in the Bank Junction to the workers through a site-specific performance. The performance aims to causes shifts in the land value momentarily and raise consciousness among the users of the site.Note:Please wear warm clothes and carry a raincoat/umbrella in case of unanticipated weather.On arriving, please sit on the plinth of the Bank of England as will be indicated on the day.Shivani Shah is a Situated Practice student at the Bartlett.This project is in collaboration with choreographer and dancer Camilla Isola, Gladys Wen, Iris Athanasiadi and Sophie Holland.

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