Tonight's lecture has been cancelled due to winter weather conditions. Stay tuned for the new lecture date.
Throughout history, the project of architecture was realized by draining swamps, marshes, and wetlands. Dividing the land into a liquid and solid, butchering the territory for agriculture, waterways, and settlements, extracting and parceling it by expelling the indigenous - all are technologies of architecture and colonization. To notice the swamp below our feet is to switch to a nondualist ontology more appropriate to the Anthropocene. Architecture today must embrace the swamp, with its hybridity, complexity, queerness, and paradox, as a way to decolonize and de-school itself.
This presentation will discuss the Swamp as a conceptual character and a window into its own operation through which we can conceive the architecture of the imaginal infrastructure of a swamp. With the short overview of programmatic concepts that employ conceptual, spatial, speculative and aesthetic aspects of a swamp as a laboratory, the focus will be on a Swamp School, as self-organized, open-ended and ever-changing infrastructure that supports collaborative experiments in design, pedagogy, and artistic intelligence for learning and adapting to imminent unknowns.
With a series of events, soundscapes, detours, and time- and site-specific interventions performed and installed across the city of Venice, the investigation of swamp resonates with both the planetary crisis and Venice’s own permeable conditions. “Don’t drain the swamp” is today’s imperative for architecture that wants to decolonize and to reinvent itself as a discipline calling to engage with its own history, modernity, pedagogy, and future. The swamp is uncanny to architecture, thus the Swamp School is a site to learn how to change habits of thought and adapt to the radically changing environments.
Swamp School. Sonic Voids. Drawing by Indre Umbrasaite