As part of the 2019 Prague Quadrennial (PQ), Janssen collaborated with performance designer Dorita Hannah (New Zealand) to devise a master class workshop - with students at the DAMU as part of PQ's studio program - that invited participants to survey ‘smart’ in all its machinations.

 

This workshop explored urban scenography – how cities perform and how we perform within them – as a means of recognizing and critically engaging with the spatial politics of ‘smart cities’, which are deeply entangled with ideas of the ‘right to the city.’  It asks: what is a smart city and who is it for?   

 

We proposed short sharp spatial interventions as investigative strategies for asserting the city as a dispersed platform of multiple overlapping sites that encourage, facilitate, control and/or limit public performances.

 

  

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