Rewriting Publics: Spatial Practice and the Making of the City: Rewriting Publics: Spatial Practice and the Making of the City

This chapter advances an original methodological framework for spatial practice as a critical mode of artistic research that reconfigures relationships between publics, sites, and materials. Drawing on posthuman and relational theories (Haraway, Barad, Ingold, Massey), it challenges conventional audience models by demonstrating that publics are not pre-existing entities but emergent formations constituted through iterative acts of making, rewriting, and participation. Through analysis of three projects by Partisan Social Club—Talk to the Land, How to Practise the Culture-Led Re-Commoning of Cities, and Collective Nouns—the chapter evidences how modest artistic gestures such as banners, posters, performances, and participatory texts operate as probes into the material and political life of place. These works enact performative rewritings of historical and ecological contexts, generating new spatial configurations and imaginaries of collective agency. The significance of this research lies in its response to urgent global challenges—climate crisis, austerity, and democratic deficit—by proposing spatial practice as situated publishing that foregrounds material agency and ethical attentiveness. This approach contributes rigorously to debates on participation, care, and resistance in art, design, and architecture, offering a generative model for reassembling publics and places.