Sepideh Karami, PhD researcher "Interruption - A Performative Critical Practice of Architecture", (75% review Friday 9 December 14.30)

From the midst of the material cultures of architecture, this research is in search of a new practitioner, who forces herself into a system of existing power relations. This practitioner is a dissident, an amateur, a lover, an interrupter, who puts love, criticality and care before institutional loyalty and the terms and conditions of employment. This thesis is a narration of how this character critically inhabits architectural sites, constructs performing grounds, and interrupts the existing established relations of those sites. As a journey that departs from the established and disciplinary boundaries of what is called ‘major’ architecture, this research stretches the tools, discourses, details, elements and methods of architecture with the aim of constructing a new practice called interruption. By moving the character through three different political sites, 1) spaces of appearance or the spectacle, 2) disciplined spaces as sites of impossibilities, 3) domestic spaces as displaced loci of subversive political actions, I examine how various methods of dissidence can interrupt the dominancy by constructing a political, critical and creative relation with, and in response to every specific site. Rooted in the politics of ‘minor’, and with having fiction and writing architecture in its core, this research investigates how interruption, as a performative critical practice, could expand architecture critical potential, through dissident methodology. 

Sepideh Karami is an architect and researcher, whose work investigates new modes of practice, which she calls interruption. Her artistic research and practice moves between different fields and disciplines and stems from street politics, dissidence and the micropolitics of everyday life. She graduated from Iran University of Science and Technology with an M.A. in Architecture in 2001. Since graduating, she has been committed to teaching, research and practice. In 2010 she achieved her second masters in “Design for Sustainable Development” at Chalmers University, Sweden and in mid-2010 she started to work as a guest researcher at Umeå School of Architecture. She is currently a PhD candidate at KTH School of Architecture, Critical Studies.