How can you navigate towards something when there are no fixed points when you cannot determine your position? How do you know where to go, or even know when you have got there? This fourth volume in the Archifutures series investigates how architecture, traditionally considered to be a future?oriented activity, can best respond as we find ourselves on the threshold of a “post-futurist” condition where the future is not necessarily ahead of us, but everywhere and – perhaps most especially – “now”. Contributors include: Nora Akawi, Florian Bengert, Filipe Estrela, Mariabruna Fabrizi, Nikita Gyawali, Ana Jeini, Holly Lewis, Fosco Lucarelli, Brett ...

This conversation with Nina Valerie Kolowratnik is divided into two parts. The first one consists in the description of her work to engage the dilemma that the Native American tribe of Jemez Pueblo faces in the lawsuit they filed against the United States to regain ownership over parts of their ancestral homeland in New Mexico. The dilemma for the tribe consists in either documenting and revealing their use of the land and the secret ritual practices linked to it, or not being able to produce any valid proof for the standards of a Western court. Her architectural expertise allows Nina ...

Daniel and I had this conversation the day after the 2013 Goldsmiths Graduate Conference, where we were both participating in a panel suitably entitled “The Sea, Shores, Islands – Territory, Sovereignty and the State.” His paper “The Construction of the End,” given that day is the starting point of our discussion, in which we discuss the legal debates about the location of the shore line in Spain, the national claims of sovereignty of a given territory based on scientific and technological criteria, as well as the various circumventions of the law that provide a form of cabinet of architectural curiosities of which ...

Border Thinking: Disassembling Histories of Racialized Violence aims to question and provide answers to current border issues in Europe. Central to this investigation is a refugee crisis that is primarily a crisis of global Western capitalism and its components: modernization, nationalism, structural racism, dispossession, and social, political, and economic violence. In this volume, these notions and conditions are connected with the concept of borders, which seems to have disappeared as a function of the global neoliberal economy but is palpably reappearing again and again through deportations, segregations, and war. How can we think about these relations in an open way, ...

Lucie Bacon and I had this conversation only a few days after she finished her second field trip in Bosnia-and-Herzegovina where her research took her to study the European Union politics of “externalization,” i.e. the ‘subcontracting’ of its (anti-)migration policies outside of the Shenghen Space. Lucie has visited some asylum centers, where numerous migrants wait to be granted their legal status, and detention centers, where migrant bodies are imprisoned prior to their expulsion. She collected numerous testimonies from migrants themselves, but also organizers, activists, administrative officials, etc. and tell us about them in this discussion. We also talk about her ...

How is contagion designed? How do labour, migration, habits and data configure contagion? Analyzing the current conjuncture through these vectors, this book critically addresses issues of rising unemployment, restricted movement, increasing governance of populations through data systems and the compulsory redesign of habits. Design logics underscore both biological contagion and political technologies. Contagion is redesigning how labour and migration are differentially governed, experienced and indeed produced. Habits generate modes of exposure and protection from contagion and become a resource for managing biological and social life. Data turns contagion into models that make a virus actionable and calculable. New modes of ...

As the Israeli bombs stop raining on Gaza and, with them, the outrage that this recent chapter of the continuous siege on this small land of Palestinian territory triggered, the last thing that we should wish is that things “go back to normal.” The normal is unacceptable, since it is made of the same violence than the bombings, only in a less spectacular manner. Throughout this text, I propose to use the oxymoronic phrase of “normal violence” in order to describe the (infra)structural subjection imposed on the Gaza inhabitants.

Through sorcery and extraction, the EURO–VISION series begins with Prof Adekeye Adebajo, Director of the Institute for Pan-African Thought and Conversation at the University of Johannesburg. The conversation focuses on the history of extraction between the European and the African continent, which has laid the groundwork for the Critical Raw Materials Initiative to take shape. A key event in this genealogy is the Berlin Conference (1884-85), led by the Chancellor of Germany, Otto von Bismarck, during which plenipotentiaries of fourteen states — none of which were from Africa — assembled to discuss the partition of the African continent. After a ...

Yes, the nature of Geology is, at the same time, both invisible and strongly material. Geologists often use a term that I find interesting for its allegorical potential: The Picture. It is common to say, for example, ‘you do not get The Picture’. And it’s interesting because %99 of The Picture is lost. Rocks and mineral compositions are pieces of The Picture. The movement of tectonic plates and the crest of a ridge are pieces of The Picture. The deposition of strata is also part of The Picture. The Picture is missing and we can only see small and fragile ...

Was there ever anything inherent? Or wasn’t there always something different—appropriated? The narratives of identity: exhausted among undead restoration and the fragmented dis­ courses of equality. Every self­-image forecasts its own disappearance. The longer you look at it, the more alien its returning stare. Even a square centimeter of mucous membrane or the thin­ nest of biofilms reveal the body as a transitory space, the individual as a colony: I am I and all my microorganisms—and those of my ancestors and their genotypes formed through ages of adapta­tion. Mutation and migration—from micro­ to socio­biome: we are we and all our languages, ...

Beyond performative resistance and melancholic complicity with the existing order, a crucial strategy emerged in the 1980s from a collective of artists in Yugoslavia who used complicity as its most lethal weapon. Inke Arns and Slavoj Žižek have respectively described the activities of NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst) and its sub-groupings (the band Laibach and the artist collective IRWIN, and Scipion Našice Sisters Theatre, among others) variously in terms of over-identification or subversive affirmation, as performing the “hidden reverse” of state ideology. From Laibach’s nationalism in drag to the issuing of a passport for an imagined “NSK state,” NSK is perhaps ...

Neoliberalism began as the idea that economic rationality could be applied as a model of governance in place of political ideology. No more authoritarianism. Just the rational calculation of people’s needs and wants. But now we realize that needs and wants are not rational. They are crazy. And they take place on such vastly different scales that, without any political idea to stabilize desires and render them accountable—even simply in the sense of being legible and comprehensible—we are faced with nothing but irrationality as a governing order. Even logistical mechanisms are only the infrastructural bracketing of a rational order that ...