Selvie, which stands for cypress tree in Albanian, is one of the oldest symbols of mourning and death, but it is also a tree planted in burial sites for protection against evil spirits.

Dwelling between mourning and hope, a woman named Selvie walks us through her own story, which is the one of many in Kamza. It is also a story that reminds us on the importance of community support and bonding as a form of resistance.

This short video is part of a greater discourse that reflects on the real architectural conditions that sustain community life and bonds over time against ruthless neoliberal dynamics of destruction.

Let’s call for Selvie’s magic, to remember that we can also conjure spells to protect life in our communities as our ancestors did.
@en

Selvie, which stands for cypress tree in Albanian, is one of the oldest symbols of mourning and death, but it is also a tree planted in burial sites for protection against evil spirits. Dwelling between mourning and hope, a woman named Selvie walks us through her own story, which is the one of many in Kamza. It is also a story that reminds us on the importance of community support and bonding as a form of resistance.@en

This lava brick resulted from a situated project that studies, through making, the house–workshop of a Zapotec woman artisan who hosted me over two long periods of time.

The process of working with clay externalised the knowledge of my thinking body by materialising embodied memories in the brick (the 2017 earthquake in Mexico, my training as an architect, etc.), while at the same time internalising new bodily memories created in the process of making and through daily practice in the spaces where the activity took place. Thus, I could tacitly assimilate the spaces’ practical and symbolic functions, everyday dynamics, embedded rituals, and the myths that structure and give meaning to them. The thinking mind comes into play when an architectural analysis is made a posteriori, processing information and making explicit a vast cultural knowledge embedded in spaces that otherwise would have been overlooked because of their seemingly ‘simple’ or ‘uninteresting’ appearance.@en

This documentary narrates through Zapotec women voices the entanglement of language, culture, myths, beliefs, natural catastrophes and the quotidian experience of these women in their communities. A material I worked with to create an installational work in a Zapotec community of black clay women artisans from Oaxaca, Mexico. It is the continuation of “Oaxaca. Earth moves”, a project which explores the earthquake suffered in Mexico in September of 2017, through my work with black clay in the house-workshop of a Zapotec woman who hosted me during several periods of time.@en

Our current “Anthropocene-Capitalocene condition asks architecture […] to take care seriously” (Fitz & Krasny, 2019, p. 20). Care for oneself, for the others and the planet in a “life-sustaining web” where architecture is “much part of weaving this web”(Fitz & Krasny, 2019, p. 13). This research departs from two facts:

Firstly, that indigenous populations are the guardians of our genetic biocultural memory as specie –a memory which is genetically recorded, necessary for the survival of any specie- that allows for socioecological resilience. This is, “the capacity of a social productive system to cope and resist unpredictable and catastrophic changes maintaining themselves within their normal state”(Toledo et al., 2009, p. 99). A capacity that in our case, was interrupted by the scientific and industrial revolution (Toledo & Barrera-Bassols, 2008).

Secondly, that in this moment in history, closely associated with the Enlightenment, were established the foundations of the Western program of modernity which entailed a type of thought built on the binary distinction human/non-human that many cultures on Earth do not share. This, according to Braidotti, generated a universalization of Western thought built over a basis of excluded “racialized, sexualized and naturalized others”, creating a sense of exceptionalism over species and bodies including nature, as an endless supply for exploitation (Braidotti, 2013). “Human” is not a neutral term. Who counts as human? Whose knowledge is recognize as valid?. Yet, “Mayas from Yucatan are three thousand years old, pygmies sixty thousand… [and] our civilization has placed itself on the border of collapse in barely three hundred years.”(*) (Toledo et al., 2009, p. 99)

As the need of finding socially and environmentally resilient solutions is highly pressing, this project revises counter-hegemonic architectural practices situating itself on the Zapotec indigenous cosmopraxis from Oaxaca (Mexico): on its episteme and praxis of living, to discuss what it really entails, in our current time, to practice Architectures of Care.

How Zapotec way of thinking, which implies a symbiotic relationship with the environment in a human-non human-nature-culture continuum, is expressed in the house? How this approach, which involves a way of design thinking that totally differs from hegemonic Western approaches, can help us to nurture resilience through inclusive, architectures of care? Could we complement each other’s knowledge for the sake of building a better future for all? [...]@en

Around 1661, Johannes Vermeer painted what has become one of the most famous city views: the View of Delft. The city of Delft is depicted from across the water of the River Schie. We see the city as a collection of brick buildings with lower and higher towers, peaking into the sky, and being reflected in the water of the river. The light looks alive: despite the clouds it is bright, setting the buildings of Delft and the riverbank in the foreground in a palpable warmth. Delft, an intermediate European city in the province of South Holland, between The Hague and Rotterdam, has featured quite prominently in Dutch city narratives, partially thanks to Vermeer’s paintings, which showed fragments of both spatial and social characteristics of the city in the sev-enteenth century. In the same period, biologist Anthoni van Leeuwenhoek experimented with lenses and built a microscope, which led to the discovery of the micro-world of cells and bacteria. The city’s small streets, the canals, the church towers and the market squares still remind us of the times of Vermeer and Van Leeuwenhoek. But Delft today, as a centre of trade, knowl-edge and art, is a very vibrant city, with the University of Technology as one of its most celebrated contemporary inhabitants. The TU Delft is recog-nized around the world for educating progressive thinkers and innovators in varied engineering fields, while its Faculty of Architecture has raised, and keeps raising, inspired generations of architects and designers. As Delft is the city where this Writing Urban Place network originated, and where many members of the network have lived, studied or lectured, or are still doing all the above, we have asked our Delft-related colleagues for their views on Delft, painting for our readers, in words, their accounts of the sociospatial characteristics of this city, their relationship with the water, their favourite urban places, their personal Views of Delft.@en

This installation is the continuation of “Oaxaca. Earth moves”, a project which explores the earthquake suffered in Mexico in September of 2017, through the work with local black clay material in the house-workshop of a Zapotec woman who hosted me during several periods of time. [...]@en

Serie de fotografías y dibujos, inspirada por las notas de un viaje a México (2017) recopiladas a modo de poema, que queda marcado por el evento del sismo y los estragos sufridos en el estado de Oaxaca. Ahí nos encontramos con las mujeres que infatigables reparan e hilan ese telar natural que es la continuidad de la vida, estructurando su comunidad y cotidianeidad. La arquitectura como cultura material, se redefine a través de un mosaico de experiencias y reflexiones, expresadas con imágenes y texturas que invitan a pensar en conexiones múltiples: el sismo, el mito, el mundo femenino y su capacidad generadora, junto con los lazos, los elementos que los crean y las relaciones humanas. Elementos y situaciones locales que pueden extrapolarse a otras escalas y geografías para pensar sobre lo que nos une y nos diferencia, o encontrar relaciones inesperadas, “proveyendo puntos de entrada a ecologías posthumanas”. A través de yantras o diagramas, se relacionan las diosas Tlaltehcutli y Kali con la Medusa y otros elementos de arquitectura (el monolito urbano de Tlaltehcutli, acróteras en forma de Medusa...). Las tres representan fuerzas femeninas y mitos de rasgos comunes: una destrucción aterradora en la que la sangre (el sacrificio) fertiliza “vientres telúricos” dando lugar a renaceres de dimensiones más profundas.@en

Technological mediation expands and multiplies our bodily capacities, since it influences the way we relate to our environment. This directly affects our notion of architecture, its scope and practice. From the body-machine to super-bodies and enhanced senses, to the virtual, or the de-codification of data into visual and physical experience, we nowadays require new ethical arguments and considered awareness. This architectural proposal presents a sensitive use of technology that supports and encourages environmental and social sustainability. Supported by scientific literature, it anticipates a novel use of augmented reality and proposes future architectural scenarios which include new materializations and forms of spatial and sensorial experiences.@en

Mille-oeille acts as an architectural proposal that offers an alternative to the inherited old-fashioned notion of buildings and recreational parks based on animal captivity for “educational purposes.” At a greater scope, Mille-oeille is also an invitation to rethink the basic principles of our interaction with both the human and the non-human on a planetary scale. As new forms of thinking and being in the world might require expression by other type of materialities, the Colored Liquid Crystal, a new material provisionally patented, expresses the qualities and potentials of new paradigms through this specific architectural case study. Mille-oeille is a building that breathes, changes appearance, mutates, and transforms according to its surroundings and the amount of information it is fed with. Mille-oeille receives images, data, and objects from scientific expeditions around the globe. Mille-oeille as a living entity responds to the environmental conditions that it is exposed to.@en

A través del análisis de la casa-taller de una artesana zapoteca y su contexto urbano, y las acciones cotidianas que le dan forma y viceversa, se reflexiona sobre la noción de intimidad como forma de resistencia en un mundo globalizado cuyas ciudades sufren, entre otros problemas, un progresivo destejido social, la soledad invisible, la precarización del espacio-tiempo o la falta de negociación entre los espacios de cuidado y trabajo. Este análisis posee una doble intención: buscar respuestas en epistemologías que la tradición moderna occidental ha excluido (en una comunidad indígena de costumbres matriarcales) con otro tipo de subjetividades que nos ayuden a pensar de forma creativa algunos de los retos arquitectónicos contemporáneos a los que nos enfrentamos, así como a superar formas de pensamiento heredadas de la ideología de la arquitectura moderna, para poder re-evaluarla con ojos renovados. Esta investigación se sitúa dentro del marco de la teoría crítica posthumana (Braidotti, 2013) y combina métodos artísticos, arquitectónicos y etnográficos para superar formas lineales de pensamiento y patrones de exclusión.@en

“Hay otras formas completas de pensar y vivir […] que implican técnicas proyectuales bien distintas y que sin duda dan por resultado espacios […] que se alejan, en mayor o menor medida, de los que aún hoy tienen prestigio entre muchos profesionales”. Utilizando como marco de análisis las reflexiones de Iñaki Àbalos en La buena vida, este ensayo, con aspectos de relato, pretende —tanto en su forma y contenido— liberar la iglesia del Espíritu Santo de Lina Bo Bardi (1976-1982, Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, Brasil) de lecturas superficiales que dificulten su comprensión y alcance, rescatándola de posibles miradas condicionadas por materializaciones arquetípicas heredadas de la modernidad.

Esta arquitectura fenomenológica y mestiza, expresión de la idiosincrasia brasilera, es además una declaración de viabilidad de la vivienda social, por la que Bo Bardi llevaba luchando casi veinte años cuando completó este proyecto. Está ahí para quien quiera escuchar, ver o creer: es un testimonio de lo imposible hecho posible.@en