Barbara Prezelj
Job title:
Lecturer in Landscape Architecture
Office:
2.20, Evolution House
Research Output:
Edinburgh Research Explorer linkBiography
Barbara Prezelj is a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture and a PhD candidate at ESALA, Edinburgh College of Art. She holds a MSc from TU Delft, the Netherlands and a BSc from University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, both in Landscape Architecture. Prior to her work in academia, she has worked professionally as a landscape architect in London, Amsterdam and Ljubljana. Barbara’s work sits at the intersection of non-representational theory, affect studies and process philosophy. Her PhD thesis titled Urgency Felt: Landscape Practices of the Event explores urgency as affective/bodily significance and adopts the realm of experience as an object of design. Arguing that landscape design is primarily a cultural and experiential practice, the thesis explores what would it mean, for a design argument, to take the experiential/affective register as seriously as the more manifestly material and epistemological register of socioecological performance. It follows that much of Barbara’s work aims to affirm the role of the body and sensation in the unfolding climate emergency, which directly influences what and how she teaches.
Research interests
- Landscape aesthetics through affect
- Environmental urgency
- Embodied and durational relationship with land
- Coastal transitory commons
- Experiential mapping practices
Barbara teaches and acts as a course organiser on undergraduate and postgraduate courses across MA and MLA Landscape Architecture programmes.
Academic year 2024/25:
- Situating Landscape Architectural Theory (ARCH11272)
- Landscape Architecture Design 1B (ARCH08030)
- Landscape Architecture Techniques 1 (ARCH08037)
Barbara sees thoughtful pedagogic practices as infrastructures for learning that need to be constantly rethought. She believes in the necessity of critical and transdisciplinary thinking and works towards equipping students with conceptual tools that allow them to critically orient themselves inside our current predicament and build new common grounds – physical as much as political and intellectual.
In connection with her PhD research, she has begun working on and testing out what she calls ‘eventful pedagogy’:
A pedagogy that is eventful is committed to a future inscribed by qualitative transformation not just pure change. It is critical and transdisciplinary, speculative yet firmly grounded in the world. It cultivates a culture of complexity, grounds itself in sustained (field) exploration and probes the collective and negotiated nature of contemporary landscape practice. It advances direct experience as a core component of the studio or theory seminar and understands experience as both a design instrument and a vital object of contemporary landscape practice.
Research
Research
Research activities
Urgency Felt: Landscape Practices of the Event
Barbara’s ongoing PhD project explores urgency as affective/bodily significance and adopts the realm of experience as an object of design. Grounding itself in environmental urgencies on the British coast, the thesis traces affective underpinnings of historic and present sociomaterial coastal tensions, in particular as they relate to the problematic of bodies—human and non-human, individual and collective—from the postwar phenomenon of mass-tourism to the present-day realities of climate change. By turning attention to the non-semantic register of signification, the project is interested in what might today constitute a compelling (landscape architectural) argument on the coast. Regarding a reconceptualization of environmental urgency away from abstract measure as crucial to that process, the research approaches it instead as both a cognitive framework for landscape experience and as an experiential framework for cognition.
Selected publications
Prezelj, Barbara, and Gregory Seigworth. “The Elbow Room of the Universe: Technicity, Diegesis, Force.” In The Space of Technicity: Theorising Social, Technical and Environmental Entanglements, edited by, Robert A. Gorny, Stavros Kousoulas, Dulmini Perera and Andrej Radman. Delft: TU Delft OPEN Publishing & Jap Sam Books, 2024.
Prezelj, Barbara. “Practicing Amid/Upon/With Urgency.” In (BUILDING) NEW PERSPECTIVES through Practice-Led Research in Art, Design and Architecture. Conference proceedings. Riga: Art Academy of Latvia, 2023.
Prezelj, Barbara. “The Allure of the Flap.” Thresholds 50 (2022): 321–30.
Prezelj, Barbara. “Red Filter: In Search of Shimmer.” In Postcards from the Anthropocene. Unsettling the Geopolitics of Representation., edited by Benek Cinik and Tiago Torres-Campos, 236–37. Barcelona: dpr-barcelona, 2022.
Prezelj, Barbara, and Heidi Sohn. “Towards an Aesthetics of Affect for Landscape Architecture/Urbanism.” In Beyond Ism: the Landscape of Landscape Urbanism. Alnarp: Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, 2016.
