{"id":888,"date":"2026-05-27T12:22:06","date_gmt":"2026-05-27T11:22:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/tracey\/?p=888"},"modified":"2026-05-27T12:22:07","modified_gmt":"2026-05-27T11:22:07","slug":"drn2026-drawing-as-storytelling-braiding-the-terrain-online-event-11-00-bst-24-june-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/tracey\/drn2026-drawing-as-storytelling-braiding-the-terrain-online-event-11-00-bst-24-june-2026\/","title":{"rendered":"DRN2026 Drawing as Storytelling: Braiding the Terrain Online Event 11.00 (BST) 24 June 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Elif Adiguzel, 2024,\u00a0Diffracting Details, Texts, and Drawings: When Gaps Tell Stories<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Tickets available here: https:\/\/buytickets.at\/drawingresearchgroup\/2235052<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Braiding the Terrain<\/strong> is the third in a series of online events in collaboration with the Storytelling Academy at Loughborough University, which explore the relationship between Drawing and Storytelling. Drawing begins where words cannot reach, and storytelling begins when images ask to be read. This final panel brings together artists and researchers exploring the theme of braiding the terrain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joanna Leah\u2019s<\/strong> presentation Drawing Out: Notation as Storytelling of Site-Movement Ecologies<\/em> asks: how can invented notation function as storytelling, producing specific movement stories of a site rather than merely recording them? Leah develops \u201cdrawing out\u201d as a practice-based method for constructing diagrammatic notations that map movement relations between sites, human bodies, and sometimes non-human species. Drawing is treated as the residue of movement and the memory of embodied thinking, while story is approached as a choreography of images that fold into one another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The research proceeds through repeated site visits and iterative notation-making responsive to terrain, built form, weather, and co-present species. Instead of a pre-existing symbol system, Leah invents marks from observed and enacted dynamics: crossings, loops, pauses, detours, proximities, avoidances, and thresholds. Within Leah\u2019s ongoing project blubilds<\/em>, these diagrams operate as event-scores, translating temporal sequences into spatial configurations. The scores do not remain static; they lift off the page through close encounters with movement ecologies, becoming prompts for performance and action-based drawing.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Relational patterns can then be read as narrative structures: habitual gaits braided with terrain; material forces such as wind and tides shaping attention; and encounters between species marking thresholds. Leah situates the work within diagram dynamics and performative inscription (Drucker, 2013), relational figuration (Zdebik, 2012), drawing as analogy and generative abstraction (Drawing Analogies, 2025), and choreographic systems accounts of liveness and emergence (Rubidge, 2009). In doing so, notation acts as both research instrument and narrative device, inviting audiences to re-sense what persists together.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elif Adiguzel <\/strong>will <\/strong>present Diffracting Details, Texts, and Drawings: When Gaps Tell Stories.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

 Adiguzel suggests in \u201cThe Tell-the-Tale Detail<\/em>,\u201d Marco Frascari argues that detail in architecture is not merely a technical joint but a narrative device that tells the story of the building (Frascari, 1984). Throughout my encounter with this gecekondu*<\/em>-time-being, this insight echoes as the gecekondu\u2019s undesigned details create gaps that invite the possibility of living and dying together in a more-than-human world. These encounters remind me that an architectural drawing begins to tell its story when its completeness and rationality are broken and gaps open space for other ways of thinking, as in Jane Rendell\u2019s reading of Jennifer Bloomer\u2019s \u201cdirty drawings<\/em>\u201d as feminist interventions that expose the insufficiency of rational, \u201cclean<\/em>\u201d architectural representation and open space for other voices and bodies (Bloomer, 1993; Rendell, 2018). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Telling such stories is neither easy nor an individual practice; it requires gaps as well as threads that invite the reader\u2019s imagination (Haraway, 1988). In this research, Adiguzel weaves the lines of drawing with the cadence of words, allowing each to generate its own gaps through their encounters and thus to resist a singular narrative. Through Karen Barad\u2019s diffractive method, reading for \u201cpatterns of dif erence that make a dif erence<\/em>\u201d by iteratively entangling texts and materials (Barad, 2007), paragraphs from two novels by Latife Tekin intra-act with anecdotes from the gecekondu\u2019s owners, while the incompleteness of the drawing tells the tale of the details. This research asks how gaps in drawing, in text, and in the building\u2019s details might become sites of diffraction that generate a story otherwise, through a diffractive reading practice (Barad, 2007; van der Tuin, 2011). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

*an informal built house, literally means built overnight in Turkish <\/p>\n\n\n\n

References:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning<\/em>. Duke University Press. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bloomer, J. (1993). Architecture and the text: The (s)crypts of Joyce and Piranesi<\/em>. Yale University Press. Frascari, M. (1984). The tell-the-tale detail. VIA<\/em>, 7, 23\u201337. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Haraway, D. J. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies<\/em>, 14(3), 575\u2013599. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rendell, J. (2018). Only resist: A feminist approach to critical spatial practice. In A. Sagiv, I. Awan, & D. Petrescu (Eds.), Feminist futures of spatial practice: Materialisms, activisms, dialogues, pedagogies, projections <\/em>(pp. 25\u201344). AADR. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

van der Tuin, I. (2011). A different starting point, a different metaphysics: Reading Bergson and Barad diffractively. Hypatia<\/em>, 26(1), 22\u201342. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nikola Dicke\u2019s <\/strong>presentation, <\/strong>When Maps Start Talking: Animated Drawing as Narrative Knowledge <\/em>will consider Dicke\u2019s analogue, site-specific projection mapping, soot-on-glass miniatures drawn by hand expand into large-format, often spatially layered light drawings that visitors can watch being created live and in situ<\/em> on the fa\u00e7ade. Many of these light drawings narrate stories and historical events connected to the projection site.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Dicke\u2018s project Mapping Stories \u2013 maps, territories, stories<\/em>, in which Dicke explores territorial reform as a lived and contested history, Dicke combines drawings on soot-blackened glass plates with digital drawings whose making remains visible as a recorded gesture. Mapping Stories<\/em> draws on administrative maps, interwoven with interviews that yield fragmentary memories of shifting municipal and district boundaries, institutions, and everyday infrastructures. Instead of synthesising these accounts into a coherent linear narrative, I treat mapping as a palimpsestic dramaturgy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Building on this performative live-drawing practice and on animated, cartographic storytelling, Dicke\u2019s presentation asks: How does the generative incompletion of my light drawings open a storytelling space of its own? Does the associative animation of these drawings in Mapping Stories<\/em> add further dimensions and dynamics to that space? How do public open-air screenings enable collective sense-making and negotiation of individual stories?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These questions build on narratological perspectives that understand narration as a mode of producing and sharing knowledge grounded in subjective experience (Fahrenwald, 2011), collective sense-making (Dicke, 2021), and as a medium through which social identity is relationally constituted (Somers, 1994).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

References:<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dicke, N. (2021). Thank you for watching! \u00c4sthetische Reflexivit\u00e4t im Wechselspiel von k\u00fcnstlerischer Produktion und Rezeption.<\/em> kopaed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fahrenwald, C. (2011). Erz\u00e4hlen im Kontext neuer Lernkulturen: Eine bildungstheoretische Analyse im Spannungsfeld von Wissen, Lernen und Subjekt.<\/em> VS Verlag f\u00fcr Sozialwissenschaften (Springer VS). https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/978-3-531-94157-8<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somers, M. R. (1994). The Narrative Constitution of Identity: A Relational and Network Approach<\/em>. Theory and Society, 23(5), 605\u2013649.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The session will be chaired by Yige Bao.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Biographies<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joanna Leah <\/strong>is an artist-researcher whose practice investigates drawing as embodied thinking. Through site-based fieldwork she invents notational diagrams that score movement relations among people, places, and more-than-human ecologies. Her work bridges drawing research, diagram theory, and choreographic methods, and is shared through publications, workshops, and performances in exhibitions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elif Adiguzel <\/strong>is a UK-based researcher and designer whose work engages intra-disciplinary, feminist and new-materialist approaches in architecture. She investigates architecture\u2019s ethical response-abilities in geographies made vulnerable by extractive practices and is currently pursuing her PhD at Loughborough University, following four years as a research and teaching assistant at Istanbul Technical University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nicole Dicke <\/strong>is an artist-researcher, draughtswoman, and lecturer at the University of Bremen. Her practice combines analogue, site-specific projection mapping, soot-on-glass drawing, and animation to explore drawing as performative storytelling and knowledge production. Her PhD dissertation, published as Thank you for watching!<\/em> (2021), examines aesthetic reflexivity between artistic production and reception.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tickets available here: https:\/\/buytickets.at\/drawingresearchgroup\/2235052 Braiding the Terrain is the third in a series of online events in collaboration with the Storytelling Academy at Loughborough University, which explore the relationship between Drawing and Storytelling. Drawing begins where words cannot reach, and storytelling begins when images ask to be read. This final panel brings together artists and researchers exploring […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":505,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"lboro_blog_alternative_thumbnail_image":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/tracey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/tracey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/tracey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/tracey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/505"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/tracey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=888"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/tracey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":890,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/tracey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/888\/revisions\/890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/tracey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/tracey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lboro.ac.uk\/tracey\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}