- New alliances
CO.MUN is an initiative that conducts collaborative, creative, site-specific and pedagogical projects that address the functional and subjective needs of a space. The world has been designed and built according to hegemonic representations, this initiative addresses social and political dynamics iterating from theory and practice to generate comprehensive understandings of the politics of place. Through a transdisciplinary approach that facilitates open and constant participation of stakeholders which breaks with the monopole of expertise-based research, and merges experiential and theoretical knowledge. This has an impact on the future of architecture as it embraces and engages in a political way in every stage of the process and reconfigures unjust power dynamics through the transformation of space.
Based on several case studies, we developed a framework to address our research and design projects. Through creative, collaborative, pedagogical, site-responsive, and transdisciplinary processes this framework seeks to actively call out and tackle the indisputable power imbalances during collaboration and give back decision-making agency to users-inhabitants-stakeholders in all the stages of the design process.
We see the design process as site-responsive, collaborative, and pedagogical, we are constantly exploring ways to carry out processes that consider the multiplicity of perspective and contribute to more inclusive ways of coexisting, where all human and non-human diversities are equally considered and where no norm is privileged.
The following projects are reflections of how we move from theory to practice. “Co-making inclusive bathrooms” seeked to question perceptions and experiences of inclusion. Designing and building an inclusive space is not a concrete goal but generating and facilitating processes where we dismantle and reconstruct inclusive and exclusive experiences as individual and collective experiences.
“Museums for climate action” We have made nature a minority in our geopolitical sphere, museums are spaces where we can deconstruct the nature-culture divide with enough freedom and courage to avoid falling into misrepresentations of humanizing nature. Imagine museums for climate action as a collaborative process of decomposition and dehumanization. Museums can then become, as of now, cemeteries to mourn our human conception; this way we can enter into an ontological negotiation where nonhuman e
“Fostering Women’s Autonomy: Body and Land Politics’ Appropriation” The objective was to implement a replicable participatory intervention in which the approach is to generate a dialogue between women within the framework of a daily and feminized action: cooking. Women residents of the neighborhood are invited to participate in an open kitchen and exchange of recipes. Through this activity, we would takle questions about gender and politics, discrimination, insecurity, violence, and participati
