Maddy Routon (United States of America/United Kingdom)
Madeline (Maddy) Routon (b. Los Angeles, 1995) is a writer, cultural geographer, and artist currently based in London.
Her academic work as a feminist cultural geographer focuses on creative practices of placemaking under conditions of urban precarity and austerity, particularly those led by women. Her article 'Mothers, wives, friends: women’s role in London’s squatting struggles' (Gender, Place & Culture, 2024) draws on archival materials to highlight underrepresented histories of women’s squatting movements in late 20th-century London. Her (auto)ethnographic research on radical archives and the archivists who care for them will appear in the forthcoming edited volume Shaking the Archive: Reconsidering the Role of Archives in Contemporary Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026).
Her PhD at the University of Manchester, Making home in the margins: creative placemaking under precarity in London's squats, paired extensive archival research with oral history interviews with people who squatted in London from 1969-2012. She is currently working on written outputs from this project, as well as an archive of collected materials which will be permanently housed at Bishopsgate Institute (London).
In her personal and creative writing, Routon explores themes of care, complicity, desire, and interdependence. She is particularly drawn to the question: What do we owe one another?
Her work has been awarded several grants and fellowships, from institutions including Akademie Schloss Solitude (2025-26), Royal Geographical Society (2024), and Hawthornden Castle Literary Retreat for Creative Writers (2023). Before beginning graduate studies, she worked for various arts organizations in Los Angeles, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and Inner-City Arts. Most recently, she served as Head Archivist at William Allen Word & Image, an archive in London specializing in artist books and ephemera.
- Curator:
- Julia Harasimowicz
- Coordination of the residency:
- Bartosz Grauman
- Olga Miękus
- Partner of the residency: Akademie Schloss Solitude
- Phot. Lea Gubic
