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boston-mixplaceThursday, April 5, 7 p.m.
Design Studio for Social Intervention
1946 Washington Street, 2nd floor, Boston, MA

As part of his visit to Boston, Aaron Levy will speak at the DS4SI on the process of developing Mixplace. The next evening he will present "The Small, Invisible, and Immaterial: On Reconstructing the Civic" at the Harvard GSD

This talk will take the form of a casual workshop/conversation around the process of developing Mixplace, a collaborative project that provides an alternative education model in order to address the crisis in community participation and political representation.

The project aspires to enable conversations between individuals and institutions within West Philadelphia to circulate different ways of thinking and making, linking the specialized knowledge of institutions with the everyday knowledge of communities. Slought, People's Emergency Center, and PennDesign are the primary Philadelphia institutions who are coming together to form this alternative educational model. The primary collaborators will be neighborhood youth and university students, who will interact with a diverse faculty of of curators, community activists, artists, architects and researchers. The project is being developed in dialogue with Teddy Cruz at the Center for Urban Ecologies at the University of California, San Diego. 

Aaron Levy is the Executive Director and Chief Curator of Slought (http://slought.org), a small Philadelphia-based institution whose programs focus as much on histories of cultural experimentation and political advocacy as on the creation of social practices. Levy has developed an approach to the curatorial which mobilizes historical models, and which imagines small organizations as agencies that produce correspondences, relationships, and practices of engagement.

His many projects include Into the Open, the official U.S. representation for architecture at La Biennale di Venezia (2008), which recovered American histories of architectural experimentation and community activism, and, more locally, Mixplace, which will transform Slought in coming years into a site of collaborative knowledge production concerning Philadelphia neighborhoods. His most recent publication, Four Conversations on the Architecture of Discourse (AA Books, 2012), explores the relationship between architecture and its publics, and the role of cultural discourse and display in a politicized society. Other publications include Cities Without Citizens (Rosenbach Museum, 2002); Architecture on Display: On the Living History of the Venice Architecture Biennale (AA Books, 2010); and Evasions of Power: On the Architecture of Adjustment (Slought, 2011).