Vyjayanthi Rao at Urban Democracy Lab - NYU

Terreform co-director and new Managing Editor of Public Culture, Vyjayanthi Rao, will be presenting at Urban Democracy Lab's Engaged Urbanists Working Group this Monday, October 14.

Rao is an anthropologist and writer studying architecture, infrastructure and social life in large cities.  She has written several essays and have edited two books so far.  The first is Speculation Now: Essays and Artworks, which draws together multi-disciplinary reflections on speculation and speculative practices in contemporary life and artistic practices.  The second, titled Occupy All Street: Olympic Urbanism and Contested Futures in Rio de Janeiro, is a collection of essays exploring the spatial transformation of Rio in the shadow of the 2016 Olympic Games.  The book was launched at CUNY Graduate Center with David Harvey and the editors, Rao, Mariana Cavalcanti, and Bruno Carvalho. The event was chaired by Amy Chazkel, Associate Professor of History, CUNY, Queens College and the Graduate Center. It was sponsored by the Public Space Research Group, Graduate Center, City University of New York.

David Harvey talking now at the CUNY Graduate Center about Capital, the city, the Olympics & Rio de Janeiro pic.twitter.com/S7ccmSUhZK

— The PSRG (@thepsrg) December 1, 2016

See more from Terreform’s archive. From Storefront New York to HAND annual meeting, “The Center Cannot Hold” and the Nexus Between Urbanization.

OCCUPY ALL STREETS: OLYMPIC URBANISM AND CONTESTED FUTURES IN RIO DE JANEIRO

Bruno Carvalho, Mariana Cavalcanti and Vyjayanthi Rao Venuturupalli, Editors

Contributors: Bruno Carvalho, Mariana Cavalcanti with Julia O’Donnell and Lilian Sampaio, Gabriel Duarte with Renata Bertol, Beatriz Jaguaribe with Scott Salmon, Guilherme Lassance, Bryan McCann, Theresa Williamson, and Vyjayanthi Rao Venuturupalli

“Occupy All Streets is a brilliant and searing indictment of the injustice, violence, militarisation, elitism and mind-boggling waste inherent in planning and organizing Rio as host city of the 2016 Olympics.
Through punchy prose and superb visual material, its contributors expose the myths that sustain mega-event urbanism; draw out the deep histories of branding Rio as an aesthetically exceptional city; and, most important of all, explore the possibilities that exist for organizing megacities more justly.
An extraordinary book!”

— Stephen Graham, Professor of Cities and Society, Newcastle University, author of Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism

Vyjayanthi Rao at 'Smart Cities?'

On April 23rd, Terreform Co-Director Vyjayanthi Rao spoke at Smart Cities?, a conference hosted at The New School and organized by Storefront for Art and Architecture and Het Nieuwe Instituut.

The conference investigated urbanization in the 21st century by unpacking the notion of the 'Smart City' through three panel discussions: Impossible Objects, Political Objects, and Measuring Objects. Dr. Rao spoke in the first. 

Watch her presentation below, and read more about the conference on Storefront's website. 

Kochi-Muziris Biennale

Terreform Director Vyjayanthi Rao participated in the 3rd Kochi-Muziris Biennale as a member of the artist collective Samooha. Read her article about their installation On Stage: Sathenagar Here.

“While Mumbai’s informal communities are always available to the gaze of the privileged, we observed they rarely occupy the most privileged stages as protagonists themselves.

The intention was not to create a museum-like programme to display the talents of a single community but to allow a community’s public expression, long trapped in specific forms of public discourse around protest and rights, to take flight on another, more universally visible stage.

We named our project “On Stage: Sathenagar Here” to bring visibility both to the community as author and to the concept of the stage, which operates on multiple levels to support the community as author.”

— Vyjayanthi Rao Venuturupalli