A[I]rchitectural Minds

2023

Coalescence – We don’t live where we are

commissioned for Resilienze Festival, Bologna, Italy

Taking care of the environment we live in would be fairly easy if we knew which land we live on! The problem is that we have no clear understanding of the environment that produces the resources from which we gain our prosperity. There is no correspondence between the borders of our country and the actual borders of the places that let us thrive. If you ask people where they live, they will give you an answer based on the map showing where their home is located. But if you ask them where the places are from which they draw their wealth, they will have to draw another map on which they rely. This second map, which we call a “latent map,” refers to Kenneth Pommeranz’s (2021) “ghost acreages.” It extends much further in space and time than a topographical map. For instance, you rely on international commerce, on a long history of colonization, but also on vast resources accumulated millions of years ago, and yet none of these are represented when you try to trace the borders to identify your home, the urbanized area in which you are living. The idea of the project is to make some effort to superimpose on top of one another the (artificial) environment you live in, the (natural) environment you live from, and the waste landscape you generate. Without such an overlap and experimental computation between them, you will never develop an understanding and create a sense of responsibility towards more than human survival but towards planetary interests. The resulting chimeric urban/land/scapes should trigger our imagination to rethink urban ecologies and interspecies habitations that are beyond a human-centric, modernistic idea of the city.

Credits

research team: Ingrid Mayrhofer-Hufnagl, Benjamin Ennemoser

created in collaboration with Stratasys Ltd.

curatored: Nicoletta Tranquillo and Giulia Quattrini at Kilowatt

Set design: Alessandro Eusebi