How are we inhabited by architecture? In which ways are buildings and bodies conjoined in webs of strange ecologies co-created by human and non-human agents? How is the boundaries between body, build environment and biosphere influenced by a hybrid fabric of microorganisms, organic and inorganic materials, particles & radiation, metals, endoparasites and economies? The project focuses on architecture as a catalyst for mutations and speculative forms of critters and beingness. It examines a porous border-zone between bodily, material and psychological fields of experience in relation to the build environment. In a spectrum between becomings and dissolutions, it shapes a space for speculative narratives on encounters and ramifications between visible and invisible occurrences and relations in our immediate surroundings, while entangling these in a larger narrative focusing on human/ non-human agency and speculative evolution, in a conflation of temporal, spatial and fabulating forms.
In a time when climate change and technology is changing our planet and habitats at exponential growth rates, bio- & technosphere merge in a manmade world beyond man's control. Even in our homes something is turning us into habitat. Maybe this change is a slow erosion of our understanding of the human in it's present form? Maybe it is our only possibility for survival? Perhaps we have to mutate, physically and mentally? In this thought there is both an element of emancipation and horror.
The project explores that space of horror (and fiction) and its relation to bodily and spatial disintegrations and becomings. It is a horror connected to the realization that we live in the World of Microbes, in the Age of Chemicals, Concrete, Carbon & Radiation; that our bodies are architectures for particles and spores, and that we, even within the safe domaine of our living-rooms and dwellings, are enmeshed in perplexing fabrics of Otherness.
Perhaps we have to mutate? Into the future we must, in any case. Into the future! A rewriting of the anthropocentric future. A future where we might mutate and gain new bodies, with which we may gain access to a new form of sensuality. Neither our houses or skins are shells, they are membranes. The recognition of this is perhaps an element in a cosmological shift, not towards holism, but towards needing and knowing connections. The human is always already non-human.
Through an interplay of drawings, text, objects and sound, the project will investigate a field of speculative evolution for (im)possible hybrid life- and being-forms. It will conflate synthetic biology, organic interface and prosthetic architecture into a fabulating ecosystem; It will conflate synthetic biology, organic interface and prosthetic architecture into a fabulating ecosystem.
The project aims at creating a visual and discursive scenography as a space for actions. This will be a framework for activities, that expands and rephrases its focal points and statements.The project is thought as a generator for asymmetrical knowledge, as an attempt to identify and contemplate spaces of possibility between the human and non-human and the sites in which they meet.
