The Funambulist {fyo͝ o-năm′byə-lĭst} is a bimestrial print and online magazine dedicated to the politics of space and bodies founded in 2015 by Léopold Lambert. Through its annual six issues, it attempts to bridge the disciplines of architecture and design with those of humanities and activism. The magazine operates in parallel with an open-access podcast and blog.
| Editor | Léopold Lambert |
|---|---|
| Categories | Politics, architecture, design, activism |
| Frequency | Bimestrial |
| Publisher | The Funambulist |
| First issue | September 2015 |
| Language | English, French |
| Website | thefunambulist |
History
editFirst launched as a blog in 2010, The Funambulist has for the past 10 years articulated questions related to the political dimension of the relationship between bodies, design and the built environment. In 2014, a podcast was thus developed as an open-access medium for interdisciplinary conversations with thinkers. A milestone was reached in 2015 when the platform was extended to include a print and online magazine, which is published every other month. This journey has resulted in three, but complementary channels continuously informing one another, yet holding a great, unleashed potential when it comes to the more than 350 remarkable, talented people who with their generous contributions have strengthened the editorial line of The Funambulist the past years.
The Funambulist does not understand architecture as the authored design of inhabitable sculptures, but rather as the discipline that organizes bodies in space. With such a perspective, it has attempted to formulating spatial approaches to anti-colonial, anti-racist, anti-capitalist, queer, trans, and feminist struggles and that against which they fight. By doing so, the hope is to provide a platform where activist/academic/practitioners voices can meet and build solidarities across geographical scales and contribute to a greater discussion about our political struggles.
Magazine
editThrough its annual six issues, the magazine attempts to examine the politics of design in relation to the body. Each issue is dedicated to a particular topic involving a particular scale of design and through its mobilization of various scales and geographical contexts and continuously seeks to facilitate interdisciplinary discussions transcending art, design, humanities, activism and architecture through perspectives from various thinkers and practitioners from around the world. The particularity of the magazine's contributors is that many are not directly related to the disciplines of architecture or design but, rather, to the humanities (anthropology, history, gender and feminist studies, legal theory, etc.). This allows crucial bridges to be constructed between two worlds that tend not to communicate enough to address the political issues of space and bodies.
Magazine Issues
edit- Militarized Cities (September 2015)
- Suburban Geographies (November 2015)
- Clothing Politics (January - February 2016)
- Carceral Environments (March-April 2016)
- Design & Racism (May-June 2016)
- Object Politics (July-August 2016)
- Health Struggles (September-October 2016)
- Police (November-December 2016)
- Islands (January-February 2017)
- Architecture & Colonialism (March-April 2017)
- Designed Destructions (May-June 2017)
- Racialized Incarceration (July-August 2017)
- Queers, Feminists & Interiors (September-October 2017)
- Toxic Atmospheres (November-December 2017)
- Clothing Politics #2 (January-February 2018)
- Proletarian Fortresses (March-April 2018)
- Weaponized Infrastructure (March-June 2018)
- Cartography & Power (July-August 2018)
- The Space of Ableism (September-October 2018)
- Settler Colonialism in Turtle Island (November-December 2018)
- Space & Activism (January-February 2019)
- Publishing the Struggle (March-April 2019)
- Insurgent Architectures (May-June 2019)
- Futurisms (July-August 2019)
- Self-Defence (September-October 2019)
- Kids of the World, Unite! (November-December 2019)
- Learning with Palestine (January-February 2020)
- Our Battles (March-April 2020)
- States of Emergency (May-June 2020)
- Reparations (July-August 2020)
- Politics of Food (September-October 2020)
Podcast
editThe Funambulist Podcast was initially launched in 2014 as the podcast platform of the blog The Funambulist magazine. Both share an editorial line that attempts to articulate questions about the political relationships between the bodies and design. The Funambulist Podcast releases two podcasts every week of conversations with various interdisciplinary thinkers/creators (philosophers, activists, dancers, geographers, legal theorists, artists, crafts[wo]men, architects, historians, designers, filmmakers, anthropologists, and scientists), whose different approaches and backgrounds enrich the diversity and openness of the project. This interdisciplinary aspect of The Funambulist Podcast reinforces its will to constitute an alternative (or complement) to the traditionally institutionalized transmissions of knowledge, such as the university. These podcasts are published under creative commons in the spirit of open access.
Books
editThe Funambulist by its Readers: Political Geographies from Chicago and Elsewhere
Commissioner: Chicago Architecture Biennial, 2019
For this book commissioned by the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019, we invited 20 regular readers of The Funambulist to pick, among the many texts we published in our 22 first issues, the one that appeared to them as the most politically useful. These texts are republished alongside new texts written by five Chicago-based activists about the spatial politics of their city in relation to settler colonialism, the municipality, the police, the real estate pressure, as well as the school system. At a crucial moment following the change of administration, this appeared to us as the most politically useful thing we could do to propagate the voices of those active on the ground.
The Funambulist Papers: Volume 1-2
Publisher: Punctum Books, 2013 and 2015
The Funambulist Papers are texts curated specifically for The Funambulist since 2011.The editorial line of this series is dedicated to philosophical and political questions about bodies. This choice is informed by Léopold Lambert’s own interest in the (often violent) relation between the designed environment and bodies. Although the readers won’t find indications about the disciplinary background of the contributors — the “witty” self-descriptions at the end of the book being preferred to academic resumés — the content of the texts will certainly attest to the broad imaginaries at work throughout these volumes. Dialogues between dancers and geographers, between artists and biohackers, between architects and philosophers, and so forth, provide the richness of these two volumes through difference rather than similarity.
The Funambulist Pamphlets: Volume 1-15
Publisher: Punctum Books, 2013 - 2015
The Funambulist Pamphlets is a series of small books archiving articles published on TheFunambulist, collected according to specific themes. These volumes propose a different articulation of texts than the usual chronological one. The twelve first volumes are respectively dedicated to Spinoza, Foucault, Deleuze, Legal Theory, Occupy Wall Street, Palestine, Cruel Designs, Arakawa + Madeline Gins, Science Fiction, Literature, Cinema, and Weaponized Architecture.
Biography
editThe Funambulist is founded by trained architect, Léopold Lambert. He combines the activities of editing, writing, curating, podcasting, designing, cartographing, and photographing to serve an editorial line insisting on architects' political responsibility and the tremendous role played by architecture in our societies. He is the author of various books, including Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona, 2012); The Funambulist Pamphlets Volumes 1–11 (punctum, 2013–15), Topie Impitoyable: The Corporeal Politics of the Cloth, the Wall, and the Street (punctum, 2015); and La politique du bulldozer: La ruine palestinienne comme projet israélien (B2, 2016). His next book is tentatively called États d’urgence : Une histoire spatiale du continuum colonial français (forthcoming 2021).
Team and Collaborators
editThe current editorial team consists of three members, including Editor-in-Chief, Léopold Lambert, Head of Strategic Outreach, Margarida Waco, and Editorial Assistant, Caroline Honorien. Past team members and advisors are Noelle Geller, Flora Hergon and Nadia El Hakim.
Current collaborators include Copy Editor, Carol Que, and Regular Translator, Chanelle Adams. The creator of the magazine's graphic design starting from issue 21 is Julie Mallat. The collaborators for our book "The Funambulist by its Readers: Political Geographies from Chicago and Elsewhere" commissioned by Chicago Biennial was carried out in close collaboration with Managing Editor and Graphic Designer, Suzanne Labourie and Jehane Yazami, respectively.
External Links
editOfficial website: The Funambulist Category:Publishing