The Underground Frontier

Techno-scientific modes of seeing, classifying, and measuring the earth are reformulating the ways in which territorial disputes are currently played out. Due to the mobilisation of science by capital we today inhabit an earth that is being reduced to discrete components. The extreme case of this condition is what I will call the underground frontier: The underground is no longer simply the space where resources are located, but has itself been converted into a resource. However, if one wishes to investigate the processes by which the underground has been converted into a resource and the role of technoscience in these processes, one should be prepared to investigate the spatial and political assemblages of which technoscience is part: how it is mobilised, used, financed, and how it becomes part of wider political, cultural or legal claims

The Project of a Collective Line

This essay focuses the Gran Gasoduto del Sur, a proposal in 2006, by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez, Brazilian President Lula da Silva and Argentinean President Néstor Kirchner of the construction of a gas pipeline connecting Venezuela to Brazil and Argentina. Although the project was never built its path through the Amazon rainforest foregrounds the violent nature of resource extraction. At the same time, the project raised unique questions regarding the architecture of collective politics, particularly if understood in the context of the last fifteen years of political transformations throughout Latin America

ADS7: Ecologies of Existence, Radical Municipalism

ADS7’s main research question is what kind of architecture could emerge if we consider ecology, subjectivity and living, as indispensable political and architectural categories. To do so, ADS7 proposes a way of thinking and designing architecture as a collective political practice. In 2018, we will focus on the relation between governance, social movements and architecture, what we define as “the architecture of urban revolutions”. The city has historically been the centre of politics, of social transformation and of the constitution of problems, claims and demands. The very idea of the city is defined by conflict, not necessary located in dialectical oppositions but on a field of forces, interests and power relations. This is why the question of governance, inside, outside, in opposition or in parallel with any official or institutional structure, is not only crucial but formative for the definition of an ecological project: each revolution projects a transformation of modes and ideas of governance. Today again, we observe a fascinating shift in governance, what is often called as “radical municipalism”. With its most recognised example in Barcelona, where the social movement Barcelona en Comú won the municipal elections, radical municipalism consists of a model of governance based on direct democracy and the feminisation of politics that has in the right to housing and the city its main objects of concern. In our point of view, the radical and transformative possibility of these new municipal movements lies precisely there. And, it’s what poses a brilliant architectural challenge. Architecture is a practice that has a profound multiscalar nature to organize its complex characteristics and defining parameters. Resources, materials, infrastructure, labour conditions, construction methods, social practices, symbols, ideas and habits, diagrams of use and activities are all formative elements of architectural and urban space

CERFI: From the Hospital to the City

The importance of architecture to clinical and psychiatric care is widely asserted. Foucault's writings have demonstrated how architecture has both mirrored and influenced conceptions of mental illness through history. However, this is different from considering space itself an intrinsic factor of the clinical process. This paper will explore the relationship between the clinical and the spatial trough three instances. It will start at Saint-Alban’s hospital where Tosquelles and Bonnafé laid the ground of the French institutional psychotherapy movement. Here the concern with space first emerges as an economic and political issue. To avoid famine and extinction bars and windows were removed and the doors opened. This allowed establishing a support network with family and village farmers. The paper then moves to Jean Oury and La Borde clinic. It will explore the theorization of'architectonic relations', 'atmosphere' and 'patoplasty' as the affirmation of space as a non-negligible therapeutic vector. Spatial protocols such the freedom to walk wherever patients wished and the rotation of spatial settings associated with medical functions will be analyzed at this light. Finally, the paper will focus the work of Guattari. It will examine the link between affirming the importance of spatial factors in the production of an institutional collective (as seen in La Borde) with Guattari's interest in urbanism and his work at CERFI. Ultimately, the paper aims to show the central importance of space to the clinical and argue how this relation ought to be considered as a question of a wider social and political relevance

ADS7 Ecologies of Existence: Architecture and Modes of Living

Architecture Description Standard: ADS7 Brie

Caring for the dead: The afterlives of collective bodies

The European colonial expansion marks the beginning of a death drive for underground resources. That its consequences are felt today in the form of global warming and other metabolic rifts is not a surprise. In the sixteenth century alone, this led to the death of 60 million indigenous peoples in the Americas, a mass genocide with global environmental impacts. In this context, I have been investigating a series of exhumations, with a focus on Latin America, while thinking about the practice of environmental architecture. Exhumations—the removal of bodies from the ground so as to reveal or to give light—are a key to understanding resource extraction and its geological optics. However, in recent decades, exhumations have gained further prominence by supporting indigenous demands for the protection and restitution of ancestral territories; within the prosecution of human rights violations, owing to the development of forensic practices; or due to the new importance given to soil and material analysis within disputes on environmental justice. Located at the intersection of extraction and the resistance to it, exhumations are a crucial feature of how territorial, environmental, and political disputes are conducted. I am especially interested in how exhumations foreground political communities constituted in relation to grounds and territories, often in the form of complex intergenerational relations, extended kinship structures, or political alliances that cut across epistemic divides. The range of projects and communities that exhumations capture is, of course, extremely wide, but in the context of a discussion on the rights of future generations and architecture, two dimensions of exhumation are particularly important: the cultivation of intertemporal modes of coexistence and of kinfullness

ADS7: Ecologies of Existence, The Architecture of Collective Equipment

For ADS7 ecologies of living bring together material, environmental, technical, social and mental domains. To think ecologically is not so much a matter of protecting existing ecologies, but more importantly, a matter of generating conditions for different ones to emerge and affirm themselves. Only on these terms can a properly ecological project take place. In 2017 we will focus a key object of architectural experimentation: collective equipments. Collective equipments have a long history in architecture, traditionally as instruments of religious and military powers, as tools deployed by the modern nation-state or increasingly today by private entities. Collective equipments have as well a tradition of emancipation and transformative politics. We are referring to the importance of collective equipments during post-colonial nation-building projects, from Chandigarh to Brasília or Caracas, but also to the precarious experiments where equipments emerged from movements of social and political organization and solidarity, from popular theatres and social clubs to healthcare centres or schools. Thus, if their history is most famously that of the state, it is also that of any form of social organization. Due to their location at the intersection of multiple interests and constituencies in the 60ties collective equipments were object of important cross-disciplinary experimentation by the likes of Foucault and Guattari and the CERFI in France. Their purpose was to speculate on the transformation of equipments that were previously sites of governance by envisioning new alliances between institutions, spaces and practices. In ADS7 we want to recover this research. We see collective equipments as sites of radical institutional and architectural experimentation. This brief is all the more urgent in an epoch where all around the globe institutions are in urgent need of re-invention so they can address new forms of political and social organization