Itchy City: Film Practice as Exploratory Method in Urban Experience

The allure of moving images to capture the rhythm of cities’ mechanisation and the pace of industrialisation is well captured throughout the history of cinema. The harmonisation of movements between transport, pedestrians, vendors and synchronisation of traffic is operatic as it is symphonic. But what if the pace and beat of a city is jazz; more riff and scat – expressions of cacophonies that attest to the impulses of survival, its underbelly exposed alongside the gleaming promises that are foiled. The itchy city congestion of “hustlers and hawkers” slips and glides between the bodies of passersby and dodge through the shadows of buildings – their “low frequency” counterpoint the high notes of urban grandeur.

This presentation draws on the film practice of Jyoti Mistry and her collaboration with spoken word artist Kgafela oa Magogodi, inviting the proposition of film practice as an expansive research form. Film practice not singularly as a mode of documentation or evidence gathering nor solely an instrument of story, but as an exploratory and expository method. What are the affordances of film practice to urban studies that enrich and expand an understanding of both and capture the experience of the urban?

The event includes the screening of ‘When I Grow Up I Want to be a Black Man’ (10 minutes) and ‘i mike what i like’ (50 minutes), followed by a 30 minute Q&A between Jyoti Mistry, Catalina Ortiz and Tim Waterman.

Speaker

Jyoti Mistry is Professor of Film at the University of Gothenburg. Her work explores film as research and artistic practice. Recent films include We Come in Peace, They Said (2024), which premiered at the Glasgow International Short Film Festival, Loving in Between (2023) at Locarno, and Cause of Death (2020) at Berlinale. Mistry’s current research focuses on indigenous Sámi schools in Sweden’s colonial history. She is a 2022 FilmForm Award recipient and a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at SOAS.

Chairs

Catalina Ortiz is Professor of Critical Urban Pedagogy and Director of UCL Urban Laboratory. She is an urbanist who is passionate about spatial justice. Her research uses decolonial and critical urban theory through knowledge co-production methodologies mainly in Latin American cities. Her work revolves around urban pedagogies, planning for equality and southern urbanisms. Her articles have been published in several journals including the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Planning Theory, Environment and Urbanization, Urban Studies, City, Cities, and Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. She is one of the editors of Urban Studies and a trustee of the charity, Latin Elephant.

Tim Waterman is Professor of Landscape Theory and Inter-Programme Collaboration Director at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is Vice-Chair (and former Chair) of the Landscape Research Group (LRG). He is also a former Vice-President of the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (ECLAS) and a former Non-Executive Director of the digital arts collective Furtherfield. He is currently working on a tetralogy of books on the world-making, image-making and taste-making imagination, the first of which is titled Reworlding: Planetarity and Design Imaginaries. He is the author of Fundamentals of Landscape Architecture, now in its second edition and translated into several languages, and, with Ed Wall, Urban Design, also translated into several languages. He has recently edited three collections: Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays with Ed Wall, the Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food with Joshua Zeunert, and Landscape Citizenships with Jane Wolff and Ed Wall. His most recent book is The Landscape of Utopia: Writings on Everyday Life, Taste, Democracy, and Design (2022). His writing has appeared in a variety of journals including the Journal of Architecture and Landscape Architecture Magazine.

Image credit: I mike what I like (Jyoti Mistry, 2006)