Following the essay by Françoise Verges, in Holding Space, Together Alessandra Pomarico responds to the philosopher’s call to ‘dare to imagine a post-racist, de-patriarchalized, post-capitalist world’. In her contribution to the Slow Spatial Reader Alessandra invokes the potency of group assemblies--the spaces we hold for and with each other--sharing strategies for co-creating common spaces of learning (and unlearning), as well as tools for performing them anew time after time. She is joined by two co-conspirators in the reimagining of pedagogy: native Hawaiian educator Ku Kahakalau and queer artist and activist Kate Morales, who share protocols and rituals through which a rich spectrum of identities and practices--a pluriverse of possibility--build a home, together.

Slow Spatial Reader offers a collection of essays about ‘Slow’ approaches to spatial practice and pedagogy from around the world. The book’s contributors are from twenty-four countries on five continents. Each one brings distinct philosophical and disciplinary approaches—from ‘spatial’ fields like architecture, sculpture, and installation, but also performative, somatic and/or dramaturgical practices—, exploring how we think about and engage with space at a range of scales, tempos, and durations. The essays chronicle projects and processes that amplify tangible and intangible qualities of spatial experience: reaching into the cracks of the body, probing the fuzzy borders of atmospheres, and extending out across both geographical and epistemological coordinates. The term ‘radical affection’ in the book’s title was coined to unite those diverse approaches in a call for tender acts of individual and collective imagination through which new forms of caring, connection, and resilience might emerge. Like its predecessor, Slow Reader (Valiz, 2016), this new publication is intended to spur meaningful dialogue between disciplines and cultures, inspiring not only a different velocity of engaging the world but also critical shifts in consciousness that only Slow thinking and practice can provoke.

Author/Editor: Carolyn F. Strauss
Contributors: Lara Almarcegui, Marijke Annema, Martina Buzzi, Nicolas Buzzi, Sol Camacho, Cave_bureau (Kabage Karanja and Stella Mutegi), Renske Maria van Dam, Chiara Dorbolò, Cocky Eek, Anna Maria Fink, David Habets, Ian Hanesworth, Maria Hassabi, Beate Hølmebakk, Saba Innab, Kū Kahakalau, Bronwyn Lace, Daniel Lie, Pia Lindman, Ruth Little, Megumi Matsubara, Ash McAskill, Kate Morales, Salima Naji, Ligia Nobre, Alessandra Pomarico, Maria Popova, Raqs Media Collective (Monica Narula, Jeebesh Bagchi, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta) Jane Rendell, Angela Sakrison, Cristine Takuá, Li Tavor, Alice Van der Wielen-Honinckx, Françoise Vergès, Sara Wookey
Design: Zuzana Kostelanská Summer 2021, Valiz in collaboration with Slow Research Lab| supported by Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds andCreative Industries Fund NL| Pb | 352 pp. | 21×16 cm (h x w) | English | ISBN 978-94-92095-97-8