Federica Zambeletti/KOOZ I've been thinking a lot about how we gather, why we gather, and what flows between us when we do. We are here to discuss fluxes, which consider flows of matter, energy and meaning across geographies, infrastructures and communities. Specifically, this session investigates how global and local circulations condition everyday life, from displacement to supply chains, and how architecture might engage with these fluxes as forms of solidarity and resistance.

Our guests Kathryn Yusoff, Andrés Jacque and Tiago Patatas have each explored different approaches and means of how their practice exists as a space of solidarity and resistance in relation to both contemporary and historical fluxes. I wanted to start our exchange by dwelling on how architecture specifically might engage with these fluxes. Andrés, you have shared a bit about your ‘Transspecies’ architectures, which speak to how flux can become a design principle and imperative — as does your critical take on very shiny architects who operate on this planet. How might an approach that takes flux as a design principle, start to become more widely recognised, valued and integrated into mainstream design thinking?

Andrés Jaque That's a fantastic question, because at this point — at least, the way I understand it — architecture is a form of resistance or dissidence. When I was showing images of Hudson Yards, that's mostly focusing on the architecture of “successful” firms in business terms — this is the architecture they are known for doing. There is something of a symbolic dimension in discussing these material flows: we are, as a society, really addicted to images that are still somehow reflective of this coloniality, of gold and the shininess. Architecture is delivering that, at the expense of racialising and pushing under the carpet a big part of the human reality, as well as more-than-human realities

So your question is crucial, because my feeling is that if we go to the specificity of architecture — the forms, the designs as they are enacted through buildings, through interiors, furniture and so on — when we interrogate them through the perspective of how they expand territorially; how they are connected to structures of instruction; when we see how they are actually political projects, then we see that the aesthetics displayed in architectural magazines are participating in that particular model of coloniality and extractivism. That’s what is interesting for me.

I was very excited to learn about Tiago's and Kathryn’s's work: they’re working on the part of the story that is missing in most architectural critique. Normally, when we read about buildings, no one interrogates those connections. Without interrogating those connections, precisely in the architecture of famous architectural firms, we're missing how they operate politically. So to your question, I believe that critical architecture — that is to say, understanding, interrogating and making explicit and how architecture operates politically — is a form of dissidence, because the biggest part of architecture is aligned with these processes of extractivism, colonialism, racialisation, patriarchy… we could go on and on. We are in a moment where we must think about ways to build coalitions on other commitments for architecture, other political performances through architectural practices. And I believe that is what’s happening now. I've had the feeling that there are a number of people around the world that want to build these coalitions and want to make this architecture of dissidence.

AJ Well, in our case, we keep being part of it. I keep going there. And It’s not only me; my office is a collective with many people and we keep being part of it. Then too, new people keep coming, new things keep happening. What I would say is that we really stay with the project, and it's not a perfect project — we are working with imperfection. And it's not a pure thing; the work is never finished. We need to keep engaging with so many other questions.

But I do think that there's a difference in being educated in that environment. There's a difference that is palpable throughout the school around it. For instance, it took a lot to bring back those butterflies to that polluted landscape. And of course, the people educated in that school will take that difference somewhere else. At the end of the day, I think that, yes, we “stay with the trouble” and we will keep being part of that. But of course there are other people working in the school as well. So in a way, it's very porous and messy, but somehow it's that messiness that is different.

There's a school next door, which in some ways is the opposite. It's a very conservative, super religious school, and you can see every single detail. All the surfaces are smooth and shiny; everything's clean. The kids line up in a neat queue before they enter the classroom. It's like a military organisation, fully fenced in; it's totally segregated from what happens around. Our school doesn't have a playground — the playground is a public space, so they open the doors of the school and kids go out there, for instance, there's new things that happen. There are kinships that have been built through the last years; there's an elder peoples’ residence, not far away. When there's a break, the kids actually go there and spend time with the old people, who also go to the park with their foldable deck chairs. They bought these chairs so that they can go to the park and spend time with the kids on their break, spilling out from the school.

So all these other forms of association that are happening because the school doesn't have a private playground; naturally, the school wants to use the public space as a form of education that is not segregative, but rather in the friction with others and totally different to the neighbours. I love that we are all identifying struggles that we are also confronting. So I would say these are three examples confronting or enabling other forms of architecture and spatial organization, right?

Tiago Patatas I'll start with the idea you mentioned earlier, about how we gather. What I've been doing in Covas do Barroso started as a commissioned collective project with the purpose of examining the material consequences of the planned lithium mine in Barroso. In the process, those people who perhaps started by being — for lack of a better word — subjects in a given research, became friends, allies. In response to the question “how do we gather?”— for me, the answer seems to lie in creating these long-term relationships in this context, and in relation to research.

Another element is the role of research in the long term: how can we ensure that one does not extract but rather support the struggle or offer different routes in any given project. It helps to have the people in that community co-shaping the process. Addressing the blockade was one of these collective choices, as an example. We spent time together, we had drinks together, and discussed whether the issue was of any interest. We realised that as threats appear on a daily basis, these small victories are very easily forgotten. So we decided to document the blockade further, both to bring that memory inwards, but also to disseminate the struggle outwards — as at this point, the media landscape becomes a key point of dispute when it comes to this planned mine.

AJ In a way, it's also about how we work with others… This is something that fascinates me. Of course, the people in Xolobeni understand deeply how the structures of power work. They have been finding ways to claim their right to decide on the extent of mining, their right to the ground itself. In order to do that, they have to prove that they are constituted as a formal community. Yet as they are farmers — who need a lot of land for what they do — they're very dispersed, so the problem they have is a very spatial and architectural problem: as a community, they inhabit the land in a way that is very low in density. They had real difficulties in claiming that they were indeed constituted as a community — which means that they were not recognised by the government of South Africa.

So what they did is develop a form of civic space through singing. They met — and continue to meet — every Friday and sing songs that are narrating their struggle together, confronting the mining companies. The songs are so beautiful, and they essentially explain the details of how they are shot at, how the police are corrupt, how they see their lawyers being bribed by the mining company so that they don't represent them anymore. The songs are incredible, but they are very fragile. So what we've been doing for years now is helping them by recording them. We record these songs, and together, we've created an archive of their songs that they own; this has helped them to prove that they are constituted as a community, as they have this civic space of representation in the songs themselves.

The recording of their songs, I would say, is an architecture of resistance. That is, it is a structure that helps them gain the status of a community — and it actually has allowed them to put limits on how much mining can happen in Xolobeni now. They have stopped a big part of the mining of titanium in Xolobeni. It was exactly our role there to serve this purpose; we understood that we had to be very careful on how we work with the community, so that everything we did had to be of benefit for them. Our work was basically recording the songs and creating the archive that they have. We don't hold the archive of songs; they have it, but it was effective. I think that was a form of architecture. The archive is an architecture of resistance.

KOOZ And I think here you're pointing to forms of representation; this Triennale is heavy in representation, both visually through screens, but also in terms of who gets to speak and for whom; how do we carry voices with integrity — and where do we draw the line?

This draws me to Kathryn, and your approach towards the colonialist map. In fact we have seen several critical approaches to cartography and mapping. What does it mean to look at a map critically and to decolonise it? And what does it mean to not draw a building through architectural details, but rather through other life-forms, impacts and consequences — and what does it mean to look at the territory through these forms of representation? My question to you, then, is this: what forms of representation do we need today to challenge the complexity of the fluxes at stake?

Kathryn Yusoff No small question! One of the discussions we've been having around architecture involves commoning, and the importance of different forms of commoning in activating space and its geophysical relations. We can think about architecture as a geophysical cartography that taps into heat, to weather, to space — one that taps into the social needs of communities or not. The question of shiny buildings is important; to question whether a building is just the accumulation of capital, or a space in which architectures of feeling, so to speak, can happen. What are the erotics? What are the aesthetics that mobilise structures of affect, for example? Is it about creating a space empty of meaning — much of London, for example, is an architectural space to launder money. That taps into a particular kind of cartography — one of capital and capital accumulation and those forms of relation. What does it mean to open up that cartography? And build things that are in communication with questions of self determination and dignity of environmental relation? Here the question of porousness becomes really important — what do you do with the border between the inside and outside, the possibilities of human and non-human life; how do you activate a space, but also what you allow to exist in that space? If architecture is a bordering force, what kind of power is it wielding?

If we think about architecture as a disciplining force, as a container in a certain way, the built environment becomes an expanded version of particular cartographies (such as colonialism, empire, racial capitalism). Maybe thinking in four dimensions — adding a layer of social theory to spatial organisation — is a way to begin to think about these geographies of affect, and reconsider what kinds of worlds we're building. Who and what we are in solidarity with? We know that the earth has a colonial foundation (now referred to as the Anthropocene) that has metamorphosed through the petrochemical and extraction industries, and so I think we have to think very clearly about how we form an opposition to that. What are the architectures of affect and solidarity that allows opposition to become meaningful, in the spaces that we make?

What we were trying to do in the British Pavilion, as a UK–Kenya team, is to meet in these conditions: a collaboration of the colonisers and colonised. Our shared relation is one of relationships to colonialism. This is what we had in common (as well as a love of geologic spaces!) But we wanted to do something other than deliver a treaty on colonialism. We wanted people to go in and feel the earth as a compass; to be re-organised by the space, and to allow other kinds of cartographies to come into view. I would say that thinking about architecture and buildings as one node in the earth system can change how we think about what architecture can be and what possibilities it has for environmental and social change. That is, to think about architecture as a cartography, but a cartography that has its tap roots in a colonial foundation, which needs to be transformed, specifically by engaging a long history of anticolonial world-making.

KY Every institution has a history, and that history here in Europe is colonial. Western institutions are the ones that have concretised forms of cultural power, and so they have to engage with that legacy and inheritance. Sevra Davis — who is here with us in the audience — put out the call for a UK–Kenya partnership for the 2025 British Pavilion, and that was a big moment, I think. I'm not an architect, but I know enough — even just walking around the Giardini, past the national pavilions — to get a sense that this place is connected to world fairs; to natural history museums; to all the storehouses of culture. What does it mean to invite a formerly colonised country to come in and do something — but not on its own. You don't get the keys for a season, but you actually have to work with a UK team and produce something together?

We may imagine what might emerge if Germany invited Namibia into the conversation, or if France invited Algeria: what would that look like, as a co-curated space, a conversation across difference and very unequal power relations? What would that do to the buildings in the national pavilions? What would that do to the institutions that still organise around ideas of national culture? What if we center the people marginalised through those cultural histories of European imperialism, and put that at the inversion of power at the center of what we do — if institutions are prepared to generously organise around that re-centering and to meet the challenge that brings? Because it's not a comfortable history; it's a painful and bloody history, and the institution has to be prepared to take that discourse into its own power structures, even and especially its financial organisation. So I think that it's a challenge, and it's not about representation as much as collaboration — the really difficult work of collaboration.

Sevra Davis Thank you. Yes, I'm the commissioner of the British Pavilion, so I work at the British Council. I've been working with Kathryn now for two years, I suppose, through a lot of things — difficult and painful things sometimes, but very joyous things as well. Going back to why we did this: in my role as Commissioner, I work at a cultural relations institution which has, as we say, an arm's length relationship to the government. Our role as an institution is to foster positive connection between the UK and the rest of the world. But as Kathryn said, we are also born out of colonial legacy, and a time when these were not positive relationships.

My role now is about fostering those connections around the world, whether or not those are former colonies or not. But we also have this platform, which is the British Pavilion at the biggest international stage for art and architecture in the world. I've commissioned the pavilion now for six or seven years, and it seemed that we were getting further away from the cultural relations mission of our institution at the British Pavilion. In thinking about the 2025 Pavilion, I really went back to the fact that we're about cultural relations, even as the role is to do that through architecture. As has come up in this conversation: what if this was about connection and collaboration? That's the starting point.

Of course, the UK has a very difficult relationship with many countries around the world, including Kenya. Kenya is a former colony of Britain, and it was very risky to put that out there in the Open Call. If I'm honest, I got a lot of flack from the architecture community for putting that out. But I had to stick to my guns: this was the way to go, and to build on what Kathryn has said: it's about using a platform to acknowledge really painful, very difficult histories, but also saying we have to move forward. So part of what you see in the British Pavilion is also the sense of a new type of relationship, a new partnership. That's one of the things that we wanted to celebrate, and that's why collaboration is at the heart of it.

The key thing is that collaboration is great, and everyone loves to talk about it, but it's also really, really hard. You don't know how hard it is until you really do it, unless you're really in the weeds of doing it. Kathryn, I experienced that firsthand, how painful that can be. Delivering an exhibition is quite stressful. I won't go into all the details of convincing the institution behind me that it was the right thing to do, but it took some negotiation. We did it, and I think it has paid off — I truly believe that this is also the way forward for these types of platforms.

AJ Yeah, the question is a very good one, and very important, because it challenges this idea that politics are somehow externalised. When you confront something, you try to confront it from outside; you see it as something external to you, right? But the truth is that it’s not possible. Now, even if you wanted to disconnect with everything, there's no way to really do that. But that’s something that I don't see as a frustration; it's more like something that we need to interrogate, as Tiago is doing. We cannot claim any purity or moral superiority, because somehow we're part of this ecosystems of complicity and guilt. From an ecological point of view, that's a reminder that acts of survival and notions of fairness can only be constructed collectively and tentatively. So it's a process of collective transformation; an evolution that needs some push and violence and alternative and experimentation and dispute, but ultimately one that happens collectively.

This underlines the point about gathering at biennials or triennales — because, of course, they are all imperfect. They even seem to be disconnected, in many ways, to other realities. But it's also true that we've seen these events become spaces of synchronisation and catalysis of many efforts and alternative practices, redistributing importance and normalizing of works that are seen as marginal. New vocabularies are constructed together, new evidence that are recognised by collectives and different alliances are produced. Those are not minor things. I always keep in mind the book ‘Science in Action’ (Harvard University Press, 1987) by Bruno Latour, which claims that the alternative is not the contrary of what is attacked, but rather something that grows from inside and and somehow erodes spaces, moving them around. Yet your question is relevant: how do we make sure that we're eroding those spaces for the collective good?

For us, it was very important to work with scientists. It was refreshing, not because I think that scientists are above other forms of knowledge, but because they were good interlocutors to engage in non modern practices — which I thought was amazing — with these people that put blood on the stones. By working with and connecting these two communities, we could see that those spiritual dimensions were also responding to very practical means of how to engage differently with others. If I had to choose, I would prefer the handmade dwellings that somehow can build symmetrical relationships between people that have different cultures and training. But somehow I'm happy to be working within contradictions; that means that we're accepting that we're working from inside, rather than from a position of moral superiority — which I think is so damaging in the end.

Filipa Ramos I'm just going to add something to your question, which is really important for the large and the small concerns in terms of our relationships with the objects that shape our lives and the way we produce, we communicate, we exchange with one another; we learn and we also consume. I work in a background which is not architecture; I teach in an art school, in really privileged contexts. One is in Switzerland, which is privileged not because the school is particularly expensive, but because the country is quite costly. The other is in the UK, which is a place that definitely requires a certain economic investment in order for you to be there. In both cases, what I've been witnessing in recent years — for both undergraduates and graduate students — is a huge resurgent interest in crafts, in painting, in sculpture, in communicating with the ancestors through any possible ways — which is also a form of technology. There are more attempts to disengage themselves from anything connected to what we would call a digital culture.

In terms of computing, this is fascinating on the one hand, while on the other, it makes me desperate. Whenever I see another student trying to meditate or communicate with the ancestors, I get nervous, because if artists do not engage in technology — if they do not engage in what is happening; if they do not dialogue with the incredible machine intelligences that are supporting the making of ‘content’, experience and everything around us — then in whose hands do we leave these technologies? I'm asking this in a context in which we're talking about fluxes: how can we attenuate, question and operate a critique of borders, and is there a choice? There is a resurgence — maybe a retreat — towards the rediscovery of craft: it is described as more healing, it's more appeasing, it's much more pleasurable. Meanwhile we do as Andrés says: we need to acknowledge that our lives are full of contradictions and we're constantly feeling either emancipated or guilty or frustrated or even empowered by the systems that allow us to live the way we live and produce the way we produce. We need to continue engaging with them, otherwise in our place, other people will.

KY Briefly, I think the way in which we thought about how to bring all those writings and poetry into the space, was by making the connection between those anti-colonial writings and their reimaginings of the environment as a different understanding of materiality, enacted through vernacular architectural practices. So, to see the conjoinedness between what we were calling planetary vernaculars and political identity — vernacular architecture as a located form of poetry, of writing the earth differently from the colonial project of architecture and its transformation of the earth. Often those are spaces that are completely marginalised from any account of architecture or architectural history — or they’re deep-timed to the beginning of history, the primitive hut on the way to the high rise.

I think that we can begin to see the poetry of making — and forms of making that have a different relation with the Earth — as a kind of everyday poetics, that activates both a material and immaterial relation. That's certainly the way that I make that connection. I'm sure there are lots of architects that make that connection differently, considering how to think with poetry and politics in the same space, and to think of the poetic as a political spatial practice. What is amazing to me about those Caribbean writers like Aime Cesaire, Franz Fanon, Edouard Glissant is that they were politicians and poets — both were necessary to bring a kind of decolonial subject into being, but also a decolonial state of being that had a different relation and embeddedness in the earth.

Bios

Andrés Jaque Andrés Jaque is an architect, writer and curator whose work explores architecture as a cosmopolitical practice. He is the Dean of Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, New York. In 2003, he founded the Office for Political Innovation, a transdisciplinary agency working in the intersection of design, research and environmental activism. His projects often explore social and ecological networks. In 2016, he was awarded with the 10th Frederick Kiesler Prize for Architecture and the Arts. In 2024 he won the UNESCO Global Award for Sustainable Architecture and in 2014, the Silver Lion to the Best Project at the 14th Venice Biennale. Jaque is the author of award-winning architectural projects, including the Reggio School (El Encinar de los Reyes, 2020) and the Babin Yar Museum of Memory and Oblivion in Kyiv.

Tiago Patatas is a spatial practitioner and researcher whose work supports environmental struggles and examines their articulation with spatial politics. His recent inquiries address modalities of green extractivism, in particular the irruption of lithium mining frontiers, as well as nuclear imperialism and its destructive global expanses. Currently, he is a doctoral candidate in Architecture at the Royal College of Art. Individual and collaborative projects were presented at the Nieuwe Instituut, Galeria Municipal do Porto, and Helsinki Biennial, among other forums. Tiago holds a MA in Research Architecture with distinction from Goldsmiths, University of London. He is based between London and Porto.

Filipa Ramos is a Lisbon-born writer and curator whose research investigates art's relationship to ecology. She is Lecturer at the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel. Ramos curated BESTIARI, the Catalan representation at the 60th Biennale di Venezia (2024). She co-founded the online artists' cinema Vdrome. She runs the art and science festival The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish with Lucia Pietroiusti, with whom she also curated Songs for the Changing Seasons for the 1. Klima Biennale Wien (2024) and Persones Persons (8th Biennale Gherdina, 2022). In 2021, she co-curated Bodies of Water, the 13th Shanghai Biennale. m Her upcoming book, The Artist as Ecologist (Lund Humphreys, 2025), discusses the ways in which contemporary artists

Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London, where she interrogates the geologies of race, extraction and colonial power through critical environmental humanities. Trained in geography, social theory and environmental philosophy, her research (and her recent book Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race, 2024) surfaces how colonial geology constructs racialised geospatial forms and how Black, Indigenous and Caribbean thought might reimagine planetary subjectivity and decolonial new materialisms. She also authored A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2019), and collaborates in the collective “planetary portals” (with Kerry Holden and Casper Laing Ebbensgaard) to dismantle extractive imaginaries and rethink the endurance of colonial systems through the spatial concept of the portal. She is co-curator of the British Pavillion, GBR: Geology of Britannic Repair (with Stella Mutegi, Owen Hopkins, Kabage Karanja) for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.