Choreographing the Campus with Adesola Akinleye

Visiting Artist Adesola Akinleye, an interdisciplinary artist-scholar and choreographer, invites you to observe and engage with the MIT campus.

As a 2020-22 Visiting Artist at the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology and Research Affiliate in the Art, Culture, and Technology program, Akinleye investigates how dance-based research and creative collaboration across disciplines can create new techniques, lexicons, and conversations within urban design.

With a particular interest in how the city shapes our bodies, and how, in turn, we shape the city, Akinleye invites the MIT community to observe and engage with the micro-city where we live, work, and learn.

“We must understand ourselves as contributing to our belonging to the city, our belonging to the environment, which is possible through our ability to respond. We are not separate from city or environment, not separate from Place: we are a part of it all.” says Akinleye.

How to Participate

Each participant’s exploration will be unique: feel free to follow your own path at your own pace. We invite you to share favorite moments from your experience on social media using the hashtag #ChoreographingtheCampus in order to create a collective digital map of our community and our campus.

For more information, visit the Arts at MIT’s website.

BOUNDARY: stream of water or traffic

Location: 4 Ames Street, Cambridge MA
Parking Lot on north side of Saxon Lawn, west of MIT Building E2

Creates a distinctive flow of movement contingent on BOUNDARY creates a distinctive flow of movement contingent on the assemblages that define it. BOUNDARY appears and distorts direction because of the flows of movement the assemblage creates. In this case, the assemblage of cars or volume of water that create the BOUNDARY of a stream.

SCORE: substance of the map

Location: 20 Ames Street, Cambridge MA
Steps of MIT Wiesner Building, E15

SCORE ranges from a set of instructions or a temporary infrastructure for understanding things to a method for recalling structures or responses.

PRECISENESS: walls and fences

Location: 15 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge MA
Along the “Outfinite,” on the north side of MIT Bush Building, 13

PRECISENESS is often an indicator of the rules or regulations one can go along with, follow, but also fall off, step across, and over. PRECISENESS can create invisible or unperceived actors in interactions.