Curating Cityscapes: Ways for Thinking and Performing Spaces of Becoming

As a Chinese artist and architect living between China and Aotearoa New Zealand, the researcher has encountered many native landscapes hidden within urban environments. In partnership with indigenous women from Aotearoa and China, this creative practice-based research project asks: What unfolds when dynamic realms of native landscapes, hidden within urban environments, are encountered, narrated, and performed? How can design and art contribute to thinking and performing spaces of becoming? By ‘becoming,’ we refer to the constantly changing and intra-acting dynamics of urban space and processes of knowing postcolonial urban spaces. These inquiries form the basis of this paper, which references a micro-curating and performance project titled ‘Native Land and Other Stories.’ The project is not just performance by the researcher but also a performative exploration of collective experiences reimagining everyday cityscapes with other female collaborators. These experiences are viewed as acts of ‘curating,’ rooted in its Latin concepts of ‘caring’ (curitas, cura), and intertwined with Ewengki/Evenki, Māori and Chinese traditions of ‘shamanic healing’. These acts are situated within the ‘native lands’—waterways, forests, settlements—hidden within modern landscapes in urban environments. The outcomes demonstrate how performative moments within native and urban landscapes, and spaces of becoming, can influence architecture and art practices, and design-thinking in relation to the collective ‘others’ of the urban: women, multi-species, native, material, and immaterial beings. This project is detailed and reflected upon through autoethnographic writing and recording, and provides other creative practitioners with alternative ways of knowing and creating in response to urban spaces in posthuman era.