Writer, broadcaster and educator Tom Dyckhoff and urban scholar Sabina Andron study transgressive aspects of the urban conditions — at vandalised and marginalised spaces as opportunities made and found in the city. This tender and candid conversation draws on personal experiences that drive their respective practices of writing about space.

This conversation is part of KoozArch's issue "Polyglot".

SHUMI BOSE/KOOZ Thank you both for making time today, from opposite sides of the planet! I understand that you know each other, but haven’t caught up for a while; let’s see if the idea of the city can bring us closer.

Sabina, the minute one starts to read your book Urban Surfaces, Graffiti, and the Right to the City — which I’ve been carrying around the world — there is an immediate familiarity with the nature of the subject. Most of us have noted the difference in the way that distinct or transgressive urban contexts present themselves, their graphic sensibilities, their aesthetics. Could you walk us through your research, eventually published as that book?

SABINA ANDRONUrban Surfaces (Routledge, 2024) came out of my PhD — which has another, even longer title that I can’t even remember any more! — about the crust of the built environment. It's about trying to understand what we can learn about cities by paying really close attention to their surfaces, particularly what we can read and see on the surfaces. There's a whole communicative universe that we see, every time we leave the house. We might pick out certain things — like graffiti, for instance, because that's contentious — or advertising billboards, shop signs. But I think what people don't really realise is just how deeply the character of space is generated by semiotics; by this universe of the communication of surfaces.

One of the main things that I wanted to achieve was to figure out what methods we need, as spatial scholars, to make sense of this. So I tried to write a method-oriented book, about how to look at surfaces, but going beyond the visual. I became really interested in the materiality and thickness of the surface, all the layers that accumulate there — including their political implications, regulations, how the law deals with surfaces. That was the book, and it’s still the focus of my work. I’m looking at other facets but I see this potentially as a lifetime project.

TOM DYCKHOFFYou have been fascinated with it for so long. I remember Iain Borden telling me that you burst into his office and said, “I want to do a PhD about surfaces!” — that was all the way back in 2011.

KOOZ Maybe this is a good moment to welcome your story, Tom.

TDAlright; it begins when I was seven years old. Look at this picture: here is my scrapbook, that I made Inside, it’s all images and words. Honestly, since I was like a tiny kid — but it's taken me until ancient middle age now to work it all out — I've always been stuck between spaces, geographies, maps, buildings, anything outside the body and words. At university, I started with English Literature, later shifting to Geography — much the horror of my English tutors. Then I did a postgraduate in Architectural History at the Bartlett then became a writer and curator of architecture for British newspapers and magazines; I worked in television as well, and so it meandered.

KOOZ Tom, a lot of your work has involved words, whether it's commentary, critique and so on. Most often, those words are at the service of making sense of space for others. You mentioned newspapers and television so lightly, and much of your work sits outside disciplinary or professional conversations. Rather, you’ve been about using your words to make sense of what people see.

TDYes, that’s true. A great chunk of my life was dedicated towards what professional architects used to call ‘ordinary people’ — meaning people outside the discipline, if you like. That was the kind of criticism that I did in print, in broadsheet newspapers and on television. I became quite good at this thing called journalism, starting in university magazines; after my Masters, I applied for jobs in architectural journalism. I really wanted to work for Blueprint, which at the time was a really hot magazine on architecture and design. Instead, a job came up for another magazine called Perspectives on Architecture, which was really uncool. It was a project of the Prince of Wales — so, the current king — who was into architecture in his youth. It was an amazing, if slightly weird first job.

KOOZ It is worth mentioning, as someone who watched you on TV and read your columns when I was much younger, you were one of the very few voices who encouraged ‘ordinary people’ to think about architecture — simply by talking to us about it. It was a big deal.

TDWhen I was at university, I already knew that I wanted to be an architecture critic; I wanted to be nerdy and geeky about it. I'd come across this thing called architecture in my teenage years, and without really knowing anything about it, I realised that I was quite interested in this. What is it? This role of critic was not the kind of career that anyone would tell you about.

SAIt's so interesting hearing you say that you want to be an architecture critic. My master's degree back in Romania was in Theatre Studies — which I did because I wanted to become a theatre critic. What? Why? Where did this critical impulse come from? This takes us back to translation again, into words. I think this is really interesting to reflect on.

In anticipation of our conversation today, Tom, I remembered one of your lectures; you were talking about the elements of communication — of course, as the most entertaining, amazing lecturer. You said something about the importance of who you speak to, who your audience is. Since I moved to Australia to begin a research role, I’ve found myself in a research center that is very policy focused. My colleagues are doing fantastic work, contributing to the UN urban climate action agendas, international urban governance, and things like that. Yet it is very different from my approach, my universe. Increasingly, I have to think about translating the research and my own interests into the space of impact and policy — through partnering with local councils for example. Tom — academia is the field we have in common, but there are so many pivots that each of us has done — perhaps that are required for the objectives that each of us have with our own work.

TD I think that idea of talking about space to different audiences unites all the things I have done — ever since I was seven years old, when I made that scrapbook. When you're in a space — this incredible space, or interesting space — how on earth do you communicate that, and your experience of that space, through words or images and so on? Sometimes it might be as simple as saying, my God, look at this incredible space. Actually, you know, an awful lot of my role — first as an architecture critic, then to a wider audience — was about that very simple notion, to try and explain why something is incredible. On television, that's largely what it was about — and to sort of pull out other things. Maybe this isn't quite so incredible, or there are some problems with it.

Fundamentally, to think about audiences, who you're going to talk to, how that will then change the way that you will talk to them, the words that you'll use — in many ways, it is an act of translation. You're translating spatial experience into another through another medium, like words or images. As I've realized now — post rationalising my entire life, since I was seven years old — that's kind of what I've always been interested in. Now, I’m trying to seek a kind of academic framework to think about that.

KOOZ This gives me hope that there’s no limit as to when one’s direction can crystallise. So the act of translation for you is about communicating spatial experience?

TDYes, and communicating the nuances of what that spatial experience might be. Today, I've probably become more interested in writing as an act or as a practice, in a way that I wasn't when I was younger — I slightly took it for granted when I was just doing it. I didn't reflect upon the nature of criticism, newspaper journalism, or of television so much at the time, whereas now I've become very interested in thinking about what I'm doing. I'm not so compelled by criticism; I'm much more interested in more creative forms of writing.

When you're a journalist, you write an awful lot of words, all the time. I wrote an awful lot of words for a very long time — until about 2011–2012, when no more words would come out of my head. I just had no more opinions about the built environment, and I had to stop. I fell out of love with words for quite a bit. Ten years later, I've fallen back in love with the act of writing again — but this is writing or translating spatial experience in a different way. Over the last year, I've been writing creatively, you might say, which is a very different kind of writing to criticism. Maybe I'll go back to criticism at some point, but I'm giving the practice of writing a bit more respect than perhaps I gave it when I was younger.

KOOZ I think that all of us are talking about this craft of translating spatial realities, sometimes material-historical realities and at other times, more intangible things. We're talking about writing about the city as if it's the same as writing about anything. Is writing about space a specific act of translation — this form of unlocking what one might already see?

SASo we talk about translating a spatial experience into words; depending on your audience, you use a different format, you craft those words differently. Where do images come into this? You take photographs and I love your Instagram; for me, this is also very important. Crafting a working method through visual language to translate not only spatial experience, but also layers of meaning and power. So where do images fit in for you?

TDYeah. One of my frustrations has been due to the fact that I have tended to write through “journalism” — in inverted commas — quite excessively, which is often looked down upon within academic circles. But I find the opposite. I've always been interested in architecture as a form of popular culture — like doing TV shows about interior design and what cushions people choose. I think that's as important as what Frank Gehry decides to put in his buildings. That idea of architecture — what we might now call spatial practice — which is the idea of working and being in space that both Sabina and I come from, theoretically relates to Henri Lefevbre’s approach: that idea that we all make spaces and cities, set within certain power relations. It’s about liberating that through the act of writing. We all have words in our head, which, in part, is how we mediate space. We all think about space all the time, consciously or not.

Now, through the democratisation of photography, we all take photos of space all the time. That is something that really interests me, how this works: firstly, in a global culture where, over the last few decades, imagery has become prioritised to a far greater degree than the word. Secondly, how this works within architectural culture, of course, and thirdly, within architectural education. It's one of my few ambitions in life, to try and push the importance of words and writing as a form of architectural and spatial practice. I just don't think it's valued; over the last few decades, the imagery of architecture has far outweighed our training of architects and people that work in architecture. To think about space in words: that is my ambition for the next chunk of my life. To really push that agenda, to get people to really value words. Yes.

SAWell, yes — but you can misuse both. There's nothing wrong with the medium of the image itself; I think it's just the fact that it is used in a very object-focused way. I remember when I started a PhD, I attended a summer school in urban photography. You're going to laugh at this now, but there was a point that I was trying to make: I wanted to photograph walls and graffiti on walls, but my point was not to focus on, for instance, that one piece of graffiti as an artwork or object. I wanted to show or frame it so that the image cuts through the middle of that one piece, showing the rest of the wall. I wanted the photograph to be neutral, somehow, as if I wasn't taking any decision, showing the whole world: was that possible? I was very adamant about it at the time, and it came from this desire not to isolate something through photography, but rather to integrate it. Not to make an extraction of an object — to say look, here's the pretty building, cut off from its environment — but rather to include things that are not necessarily the focal point. This was my intention.

KOOZ I remember talking with my friend Roberta Marcaccio, who worked on translations of the Italian architect Ernesto Nathan Rogers, about this phrase used by Rogers and later by his pupil Aldo Rossi — fatto urbano — which is often translated in English as urban artefact. But fatto doesn't mean artefact, which suggests objecthood; it means fact, as well as something made by hand. It’s about both how the thing was made and the presence of it, the presence of so-called facts. Does this match the kind of slippage that you mean?

SA100%, I love that you just threaded this in, yes… Maybe this is an obscure parallel, but for the past few weeks I have been working on an Australian Research Council grant application, and it's the first time I've done anything like this. One of my major challenges is the need to argue how my proposed project will benefit Australians. I have to have this statement of national interest, for why it has to be funded now. Basically, I want to do a project about graffiti removal, about the creative side and the cultural value of graffiti removal and how it contributes to visual dialogues in the city. There's an exciting side to this, in trying to justify the purpose of what you do. At the same time, I was kind thinking about this effort that is required to translate my intentions.

TD I remember you telling me about that one graffiti artist who removed part of another artist’s piece of work, but through that removal, essentially left behind another reading…

SAExactly. Looking at all of this, engaging in my attempts to essentially parlay graffiti removal into a national concern — and at the same time, kind of resisting that notion. Of course, it’s only due to the attitudes towards this genre of writing that I need to justify my work this way. So my meta layer of thought is really, what is my purpose? As someone who makes documentaries or researches and writes a PhD or teaches, what drives you? What's the role you have, in the knowledge world that you’re in?

KOOZ As you’ve been so generously candid, it would be good to hear about your personal drives as well as what you’re able to bring into your multiple professional roles.

TDHmm. What drives me? At the moment, two things. One is a very real thing that has come over me in the last year or two, and that’s a love of writing, the craft of writing, and a kind of renewed value of the craft and indeed, the importance of writing, which I've not felt for a long time. That’s a very real, visceral, personal drive. Secondly, this compulsion, this annoyance that we are not doing it very well in architectural education — we're not. We are not teaching visual culture well — the vast world of visual culture — and we're not teaching our students about writing, about language and how to value that. Those twin things are driving me. At the moment, I can see that there's a problem, both at undergraduate and master's level. Sometimes the best drive is when you can see a problem, especially one that nobody else values. We each have spatial experiences, and it’s about unlocking those — finding the kind of key for our students to unlock those. For example, I don't think the best way forward is to demand an academic essay, and yet we require our students to do so. There are many ways to write about space and architecture, and I would really like to diversify how students are taught and how they express themselves.

I would prefer to really get back to basics, beginning with first years and thinking about words and expression. I think that's far more important: to give students the confidence to be able to express themselves in words. Particularly within architecture: architects and theorists very often make terrible writers — really bad, indigestible stuff — not always, but very often. This cliché of architectural and academic jargon has kind of emerged and that’s frustrating as well. We give our students this complex, dense, often impenetrable theory to read, without any tools with which to help them. That is frustrating and also it's very exclusionary — particularly as one of the key agendas is to diversify and widen the pool of people involved in architecture. I was always very enthusiastic about this program in America called Hip Hop Architecture Camp — set up by Michael Ford — which engages with secondary school kids of colour. It uses hip hop lyrics, which are almost invariably about space and neighborhoods and territory — as a way to talk about this thing called architecture. It’s not a formula, but why don't we instead find out from incoming students how they already relate to architecture or space through other media?

At Central Saint Martins, I've been given a much greater degree of agency with my postgraduate students. There, I've been able to change history and theory teaching quite significantly, so that we are now beginning to question and think about how the students express themselves. I've developed a program which looks at communication, in which students don't have to write an essay. They can if they want to, but then I want them to engage with the nature of what an essay is; I'd ask them to look at and research that format. Equally, they have the freedom to make a zine, an artist's book, or something more creative. We try to support them to find a way in which they want to use words. Particularly around the issues of equality, diversity and inclusion, I would like to push forward the idea that there are actually other narratives about space and architecture which might not fit easily into an academic essay context.

KOOZ You both seem interested in challenging certain boundaries; for Sabina it’s a certain sense of academic enclosure or distance from the ground — while Tom is perhaps scratching against a societal enclosure of normative behaviours, which academia allows you to break. Talking about the fabric of the city — about the public surfaces that have little to no barriers to access, at least visually speaking — I can understand a resistance within the confines of scholarly research.

SALook, I'm at my most excited when I'm able to form new ideas around observations — and that's always on the street, it's always in the city. Putting these observations in conversation with other ideas, that comes afterwards. For me, the first excitement and drive — which never goes away wherever I go, whether I'm on holiday or on a walk around my neighbourhood — is the same thing, it’s on the street. I am buzzing with it; I might notice a little series of something, a pattern — here photography helps. The challenge that motivates me, the kick I get out of this personally, is being able to push that observation. This is what excites me most in scholarship as well: I like to read ideas. I like to read vision; I like to read people who have perspectives that I haven't encountered before, on things that may be familiar. So that's ideally what I would want to produce. That's where the fun is and why it's worth having this conversation.

In my current research position, a lot of the work we produce is very policy oriented, and so I've become attuned to that. I realised that the process of that, or the kinds of conversations in that space, can seem very remote, even tedious. I understand that it’s how these observations are enacted as policy, but in terms of how it affects direct action in the street, my blood often boils. For instance, one of the Melbourne municipalities might decide to double its graffiti removal budget, aiming to eradicate it. Of course, you will never achieve that; it's the lack of acceptance that makes me think that I need to convince you otherwise. But then I come back to the fact that this is politics; it's not like my research findings are going to change that position, which is the city’s political position anyway.

TD Like you said, graffiti has been with us for thousands of years. It responds to a certain compulsion that almost everybody feels, to express oneself publicly by daubing on something, whether a digital screen or the surface of the city. It's never going to go away.

KOOZ Let's remain with the delight for a moment. You mentioned seeing patterns, observing things. Where have you been recently, where you might have noticed something like that?

SAI'll share two things. The first was around the place where I live,on a notable High Street in a pretty cool inner city neighbourhood in Melbourne. It occurred to me one day that it could be interesting to go out and just write down all the text I see. I went out with a notebook, stopping to note down things like shop names and any graffiti tags that I could decipher. Then I saw the menu of a restaurant and realised that I can't possibly note everything. So what if I was able to write down just the names? I eliminated the restaurant menus, but kept place names, tags, the shop names and wrote it as a list, removing any sort of hierarchy or authorship.

Ultimately that became an exhibition, Unredacted City — but it took me three months of going out on the street with my notebook, without taking any photos: that was another challenge. Everyone thought I was a parking inspector! I forget the exact number, but the exercise yielded about 2500 names, along a stretch of about two kilometers. It was an incredible exercise for me; I noticed places of writing that I hadn't seen before, at very different scales. It comes from Perec and this idea of flattening. I was super interested in flattening, because a lot of the senses of entitlement that we give images and inscriptions in different situations comes from an understanding of the typology or hierarchy that we're looking at. When you eliminate that completely and you're left with the words, it becomes a really interesting window into who writes the city ‚ and just how much writing there is. If you were to treat it as data, you might get interesting insights like how many tags per hundred metres — but that wasn’t my purpose.

Briefly, the second thing is a project that I hope to continue this year in East Africa, specifically in Uganda. Initially, my intention was to research the visual culture of the city, focusing particularly on types of writing and signage — because there is no graffiti. This was very interesting; it was probably the first environment that I've experienced where it's very hard to find graffiti. One question is of course, why? But inversely, another question might be why is there graffiti elsewhere? I'm staying with these thoughts for now and planning to return there to learn some more.

TDAre there different forms of graffiti or mark making in the city?

SAThere is a lot of very creative and hand painted commercial signage, which is really fascinating. There are political messages and posters, but not too many. The idea is to try and compile a “pictionary” of the types of signs that I can find, both there and elsewhere…

TD I wonder where else the freedom of expression happens. Is there a relationship between the graffiti culture and political context — in terms of the possibility, politically, or the freedom that exists in any given culture? Or between the compulsion to write on walls, in comparison to writing on the Internet, on a chat forum: there must be a relationship with political freedoms — or maybe not?

SAWell, there is. But ‘traditionally’, so to speak, what we believe is that graffiti is a form of speech for those who don't have a political voice. But that’s not the case there, right? So it's interesting to understand why other forms are preferable, if they don't involve graffiti.

Uganda is the youngest country in Africa and one of the youngest countries in the world. I believe something like 80% of the population is estimated at under 30 years old — which also means that all of these people have been under the same president and the same government since they were born. This government has claimed to be “democratically elected” for almost 40 years. It’s a complicated situation where technically, there is freedom of speech while in reality, that’s not visible.

KOOZ It reminds me of the city where I grew up; in Kolkata, graffiti — by which I mean wholly unsanctioned text — is less of a phenomenon. There's an abundance of imagery through digital and hand-painted signage, symbolic and political messaging. When neither literacy nor a common script are given facts, symbols become a crucial means to read ethnic and cultural identity.

I wonder how this plays where multiple languages are spoken, or where text is perhaps not the most universal form of communication. Then too, do places governed by more insidious forms of political control make for a more evident urgency for transgressive, unsanctioned writing?

SAI think everything you just mentioned about Kolkata applies 100% to my experience of the urban environment that I encountered in Uganda. So the interesting question — or the question that I’m more equipped to answer — turns towards the way things happen in my own world. I become more aware of how things happen ‘here’ by understanding how they happen ‘there’, and why. That's potentially a longer project, in terms of predominant visual forms and how the specific governance of those urban environments enable them or not, as well as how they're linked to ideas of belonging in the city, and how they might speak to the observer. Am I of this space? In what way can I see myself here? Can I claim anything or not? These are all questions that drive the work, really.

KOOZ I can't think of a better segue for you, Tom. I’m thinking about the fugitive nature of text against the ephemeral and transitive face of the city, in constant tension and motion. You recently co-performed a personal text in which you described the febrile quality of space as communicating a sense of belonging — or not.

TDYes, that's a wonderful connection, isn't it? Also in terms of how one sees oneself reflected in space or not, and what agency you have to express yourself in that space, in different contexts. That affects the media through which you do express yourself — whether through fugitive text and imagery, or something more permanent, like a monument.

My link came through a set of theories that I had completely discounted when I was younger, namely phenomenology. At university, I felt as though I was a born Marxist, while phenomenology seemed like a wishy-washy pseudo-philosophy. But when I read Sarah Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology a few years ago, all the connections between social justice, identity and bodily experience of space came together. That was amazing and it has been wonderful to reconnect with all of that.

By comparison with Sabina, I'm in the very early stages of exploring what I'm interested in now, namely my queer identity and how that connects to experiences of space and expression through written language. If I get funding for the research, it will be looking at the experience of queer bodies in London from the early 60s to the early noughties — this being expressed it through text, rather than through the clubs or through art. My idea of text is very broad, from novels to the lyrics of pop songs; in fact there's an amazing history of queer graffiti as well. Hopefully that's where my research hopefully moves in the future. At the moment, I'm working on a sort of memoir — which is why I'm reading my teenage diaries and reconnecting with this alien adolescent and what they were thinking — an astonishing experience as I don't really understand this person at all. It makes me want to keep a diary again!

KOOZ It’s brave to not only confront but also share and work with your personal narratives. For me, that became even more poetic when your text was co-performed or vocalised by eight other queer people from various generations and backgrounds. It meant that those intensely personal experiences of reading of space resonated with multiple subsets of people who might have felt excluded in some way.

TD Yes, from different perspectives. This was a queer reading — under the event series Queer Scenarios — but it could have been reading from a completely different form of identity. That has been a hugely liberating moment of realisation for me. But first of all, I'm incredibly naive about myself. As I said, the penny only dropped when I read Sara Ahmed — finally, yes! Using that was a key to unlock this part of my experience, and then I could begin to explore the idea of writing might be, as a shared act. I’ve been working on co-writing through a queer co-writing workshop — developing the idea of challenging the authorial voice like this is me talking, but it's also somebody else.

So I had written a text that revisited different moments in which I experienced homophobia in different ways, and homophobic violence in public space. I asked other queer-identifying people to read these words, to somehow inhabit them too. It is really amazing to hear your words voiced and interpreted by other people. As you say, it can be used to unlock things, because ultimately writing is a form of communication and building community. You want to reach out — you want to find another person like yourself.

SAOne thing that always kind of surprises me, and particularly in relation to graffiti, is the baggage people bring and how hard it can be for them to see it, on the one hand, but how easy it is to unlock a different perspective on the other hand.

For example, I recently ran a workshop and public walking tour with one of my collaborators who works in graffiti removal. I interviewed him for the work I'm doing on graffiti removal, trying to understand the ways in which these workers read space and surfaces. People came with diverse but very strong opinions; graffiti is an easy ‘hook’ if you like, because people already feel strongly about it. But when you expose people to alternative stories, you can change perspectives. What mythologies are we creating through looking at space? As soon as you're able to do that, people often change their minds; that perspective never occurred, or they might be thinking about the value or role of a wall differently. They might see that the design of a building completely refuses any communication to a site — so of course it's covered in tags; that’s how it becomes of its place and becomes a place for communication. That moment — when you see someone’s mind shift to a new way of thinking, to start appreciating something — is always so interesting.

TD Even that binary tendency to either love or hate graffiti — have you been able to overturn that thinking?

SA I have, and they are very proud moments, every time that happens. But across many things — and I’m sure this bigger tendency — I feel like resorting to binaries is too comfortable, or even lazy. It's the same as with the question of graffiti: “is it art or vandalism?” It inevitably comes up but I'm at a point where I refuse to answer that question and to those binaries.

KOOZ And that about the ambiguous position? For example, one might assume that those involved in graffiti removal see and identify graffiti as a problem.. Surely there's more nuance than that.

SAOf course. I mean, it's all in-between, it’s all about the in-between. The binaries are the politics of trying to create a discourse which makes it easier to manage, to control and to inflame people around the issue.

TDDo the graffiti removers ever look at it and say, I don't want to remove this graffiti, finding it really beautiful or meaningful? Do you ever get a sense of that?

SAOh, of course — but they've got to do it. It depends on whether they own their own businesses, or for the city. They have very different political beliefs, they position themselves very differently, but interestingly — and this is part of what I want to argue with this work — in interviews, they consider that relationship as part of a collaborative element, a visually collaborative element; the way that one party enables the work of the other is is really fascinating. The knowledge and perspectives of the city-led removers are actually very similar to those of graffiti writers — then again, some removers were once graffiti writers too, which makes it even more interesting. Of course and again, it's a matter of nuance. But nuance is not necessarily going to get you that grant funding.

KOOZ Nuance is a pain in the ass, and that's why we enjoy it. We’ve been talking about the cities, and belonging, as well as certain temporalities. A tag may be present for a particular time, during which time that writer has — if not possession — a certain relationship with the city, its public realm. This binary of vandalism versus artwork has a lot to do with property, against this notion of sort of temporary ownership or audience. It’s not even static — the same spot can serve different communities.

TDI think that I see almost everything, whether it's the page of a magazine, the walls of a city, a book, a screen — they're all surfaces to write on. They all have different temporalities and different contexts. They're all in motion, moving. There's an amazing article I read about the page as performance space, an active thing. It transforms my idea of something as seemingly static as a book. But if we see everything as different forms of media that have distinct contexts, time-frames, spaces… It completely explodes my mind. You shift your perspective, and the city changes. That's what's so astonishing; it’s in the subtlety, the nuances, the pain in the ass. But it's the most interesting thing!

SA I think the safest mode that we can be in, is to be in motion. The one thing that I'm most sceptical about is any attempt to stabilise, to make permanent, to conserve. As long as there is motion — and motion from completely diverging perspectives of life — we're good.

TD Not to quote Judith Butler at the end, but there's an amazing bit where they propose the idea of the self as being in perpetual motion. Again, rereading my teenage diaries, I was a completely different person at 17 — so the self, like everything else — is in a constant state of motion.

KOOZ Beautiful. I could not have asked for more synergy and enthusiasm; thank you both for your time.

Bios

Sabina Andron is an expert in urban visual culture, graffiti, and public signage. Author of Urban surfaces, graffiti, and the right to the city (2024), Sabina is currently researching street posters, graffiti removal, and urban surface maintenance in Melbourne, Australia and urban visual heritage in Kampala, Uganda. She is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Melbourne Centre for Cities, co-founder of the international Urban Surfaces Research Network and co-editor of Visual Studies Journal.

Tom Dyckhoff is a writer, educator, historian and broadcaster about architecture, geographies, design and cities. He teaches the history and theory of cities and architecture at University College London and UAL Central St Martins. Tom has written and presented several series and documentaries for television, radio and digital platforms. He is the author of The Age of Spectacle: the rise and fall of iconic architecture (2018); he is an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and a trustee of the London Festival of Architecture.

Shumi Bose is chief editor at KoozArch. She is an educator, curator and editor in the field of architecture and architectural history. Shumi is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history at Central Saint Martins and also teaches at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in London. She has curated widely, including exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2020 she founded Holdspace, a digital platform for extracurricular discussions in architectural education, and currently serves as trustee for the Architecture Foundation.