WRITING-WITH
HCT & PhD DEBATES with Marina Lathouri & Guests
14 March 2025 at 10:00GMT | 1A Montague Street – Ground Floor Back
During this seminar we will travel to Hélène Cixous’s promised cities, to cities past and present, cities of exile, post-colonial cities, and return to her city of Oran in Algeria. We will ask how Cixous’s embodied and situated writing, together with her sense of ‘doubly open belonging’, might help us rethink architectural heritage in post-colonial and post-conflict cities.
In the second part of the seminar, we will turn to the importance of writing with others in Cixous’s lifelong work: writing with other writers, from Montaigne to Clarice Lispector and Mireille Calle-Gruber, and writing with other artists, from Ariane Mnouchkine to Adel Abdessemed and Maria Chevska in Ex-Cities.
Readings:
Hélène Cixous (2006) Ex-Cities edited by Aaron Levy and Jean-Michel Rabaté, with works by Maria Chevska, Philadelphia: Slought Books.
https://slought.org/media/files/cixous_ex_cities.pdf
Caroline Rabourdin (2023) ‘Being outside inside Oran: Deconstruction, translation and architecture in Hélène Cixous’s “Promised cities”’ in The Translator, edited by Kathryn Batchelor and Chantal Wright, Routledge.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13556509.2023.2278223#abstract
Seminar recording:
Hélène Cixous (2005) Promised Cities, Slought Foundation
https://slought.org/resources/cities_a_seminar
Exhibition:
Maria Chevska (2005) Vera’s Room
https://slought.org/resources/veras_room
Interdisciplinary translation:
Caroline Rabourdin, Sophie Lewis and Matthew Chrislip (2023) ‘The essay as forms of rewriting: Cixous to Montaigne’, interdisciplinary translation of Calle-Gruber’s piece “L’essai comme forme de réécriture: Cixous à Montaigne”, originally published in Études françaises vol. 40, n° 1, 2004, p. 29-42 (doi.org/10.7202/008474ar). https://theessayasrewriting.net/
Dr Caroline Rabourdin is Senior Lecturer in Architecture Histories and Theories at the University of Greenwich. She is the author of Sense in Translation: Essays on the Bilingual Body (Routledge, 2020), ‘Being outside inside Oran: deconstruction, translation and architecture in Hélène Cixous’s “Promised Cities”‘ (Routledge, 2023) and the interdisciplinary translation project ‘The Essay as Forms of Rewriting: Cixous to Montaigne’, funded by the Arts Council England, in collaboration with writer Sophie Lewis and graphic designer Matthew Chrislip (theessayasrewriting.net). She trained as an architect at INSA Strasbourg, the University of Edinburgh and UCL, and practiced for a number of years in Paris and London before completing her PhD at the University of the Arts London. She has taught architectural theory and design at Ecole Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris, Chelsea College of Arts, the Bartlett School, UCL, and the AA School of Architecture, where she led the AA Visiting School in Paris: Architecture + Ecriture (paris.aaschool.ac.uk). Her research interests include spatial theory and literature, art writing, poststructuralist theory, phenomenology and translation studies. She considers essay writing as a critical and creative practice and the space between languages as a productive space for new architectural ideas. She is currently working on a volume about Hélène Cixous’s writings for the Thinkers for Architects series (Routledge).