Architecture formulates, organizes, and choreographs social behavior. It permeates our surroundings with architectural codes, value systems, and conventions that we have implicitly and explicitly learned to read, follow, and take for granted.

Tacit(t)acts are performative urban interactions with relational objects – so-called Tactiles – that challenge spatial conventions and activate new relationships with the urban surroundings.

As a strategy to develop spatial knowledge, Tacit(t)acts foster a process of unlearning restrictive spatial codes; re-learning through encounters of intimacy, embodiment, and connectedness; and co-learning through shared performative experiences.

This project alienates urban infrastructures that determine spatial actions, such as sidewalks, traffic bollards, traffic islands, and fences, to withdraw their prescribed purpose and trigger unlearning.

Legible architectural codes are transformed into Tactiles -unidentified objects- that function as perceptive mediators between the acting body and the social forces of urban reality. By creating embodied experiences of spatial proximity, Tactiles unravel tacit associations and layers of meaning and activate a process of re-learning.

Forms of co-learning are probed and enacted through various performative workshops. These workshops initiate embodied and non-predefined communication through the objects that translate intuition, new thinking processes, and ideas performatively while merging into a collective choreography.

This object will be presented at the TACK Conference in the object session SHAPERS, 21 June 2023 between 14:30 – 15:45 (CEST) at ETH Zürich (Auditorium HPV G5).

Katharina Kasinger holds a BA in Interior Architecture from the Hochschule Mainz in Germany and a MA in Interior Architecture: Research + Design from the Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam in The Netherlands. Katharina works as an artist, interior architect, and teaching assistant at Hochschule Mainz teaching ‘Material’ and ‘Spatial Design Processes’.