Drawing Otherwise was a full-day gathering held at TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, bringing together students, educators, practitioners, and researchers to collectively question the foundations of drawing in design practice. Rooted in feminist, decolonial, and pluriversal approaches, the day set out to unsettle dominant drawing paradigms shaped by traditions of universalisation, colonial inheritance, and market logic, and to open space for practices of drawing as listening, caring, and resisting.
The day opened with a welcome and introduction by Johnathan Subendran and Irene Luque Martin, followed by a session of talks. Melisa Pesoa and Rodrigo d’Avila (Polytechnic University of Catalonia) spoke on what drawing otherwise means within their pedagogical context, and Els Bet offered a reflection on drawing as a verb, both followed by open Q&A. Sixteen invited drawers then each shared a 5-minute glimpse into their own drawing otherwise practice, with contributions spanning spatial imagination, critical cartography and investigation, soft mapping, sketching, visual ethnography, and short stories. The morning culminated in a collective dialogue reflecting on the many practices shared, animated by questions such as: What is drawing as resistance or care? Can we draw by listening instead of looking? Can we draw our bias? Can drawing have its own agency?
The afternoon invited participants to work toward individual visual manifestos responding to the question of what drawing otherwise looks like, how it happens, for whom, and to what end. The day closed with an assembly where manifestos were pinned, walked through, and read aloud, returning to a shared question: What worlds become possible when we draw otherwise?
Drawing Otherwise functioned as a temporary commons, plural, unfinished, and open, inviting drawing not as a means of representing what exists, but of imagining what must be remembered, resisted, or cared for. The organisers are now working on a zine that brings the day together, gathering the manifestos developed by all participants into a collective publication. Stay tuned!
Drawing Otherwise Day was organised by Urban Design TU Deflt and Dept. D’Urbanisme Territori | Paisatge UPC Barcelona
