Orienting Imagination: What Are the Stakes on the Llano Estacado

2025 Texas Tech Art & Architecture Symposium

January 31 - February 1, 2025

 

SYMPOSIUM OVERVIEW  

Orienting Imagination calls for tangible and intangible interventions addressing reciprocity, communication, and interdependent positionings between us and the lands in which we find ourselves. 

“Same species, same earth, different stories.
Like Creation stories everywhere, cosmologies are
a source of identity and orientation to the world.”
                                                – Robin Wall Kimmerer

For centuries, religious and political structures have been erected and oriented toward a heavenly cosmos. While orientation—operating as a primordial directedness before phenomenal experience—was foundational in pre-modern architecture and art, the modern age saw a loss of this grounding and an intensified disorientation, perpetuated by neoliberal urbanization, the climate crisis, capitalist globalization, and injustice and disembodiment of place. However, since the 1960s and 70s, movements and scholarship such as global land art, planetary Anthropocene, and site-specificity have sought to revisit the fundamental question of orientation. 

Orienting Imagination asks contributors to redefine orientation and activate these discussions front and center. If orientation is “a dimensional order” that “amounts to a sacrifice of the individual building’s freestanding self-governance” (David Leatherbarrow), should art, objects, constructions, words, and architecture be oriented within and toward a specific locality? Does equitable design and production require orientation of identities, resources, energy, and labor? If the upright heterosexual body has for too long shaped the contours of ordinary lived experience (Sara Ahmed), how might queer sexual orientations—understood as a matter of residence, redirect and reroute our inhabitation of different worlds? If orientation is to shift and preserve the human condition amid anthropogenic climate change (Dipesh Chakrabarty), how might we reorient experiences of land and environment through art, architecture, and interventions at varying degrees and scales that advocate for more inclusive and ethical inhabitable and performative space? How should we orient ourselves in the Llano Estacado, and—crucially—does this region offer lessons for planetary re-orientation?  

SYMPOSIUM SCHEDULE 

Friday, January 31, 2025 (Firehouse Theatre, Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts)

• Presentations from 12:30-4:30 PM
• Break/Poster Session from 4:30-5:30 PM
• 6:00-7:15 PM: Keynote Lecture - Bryan E. Norwood, Associate Professor of Architecture, University of Texas, Austin
• 7:30 PM: Reception and Live Performance at CO-OPt Research + Projects (4202 Boston Ave.)

Saturday, February 1, 2025 (Firehouse Theatre, Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts)

• Presentations from 9:30 AM - 1:00 PM
• Lunch Break: 1:00 -2:30 PM
• Presentations from 2:30-5:30 PM
• Closing Reception: 5:30-7:00 PM

More information coming to this page by mid-January.

SYMPOSIUM STEERING & REVIEW COMMITTE   

Ke Sun, Texas Tech University, Huckabee College of Architecture
Joe Arredondo, Texas Tech University, Director, Landmark Arts in the School of Art Director
Chris Taylor, Texas Tech University, Director, Land Arts of the American West
Kevin Chua, Texas Tech University, School of Art
Natalie Hegert, Texas Tech University, School of Art; Arts Editor, Southwest Contemporary

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