Slow Spatial Research: Chronicles of Radical Affection is a collection of essays about ‘Slow’ approaches to spatial practice and pedagogy from around the world. The book’s contributors are from twenty-two 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.
