Between the 14th and the 18th century, tens of thousands of women accused of witchcraft were tortured and executed, both in Europe and throughout the colonial expansion. The pre-modern witch-hunts were fuelled by the effects of extremely cold temperatures, the subsequent impact on the economy, pervasive hunger, and the expansion of the pest. The state and the religious forces found in ‘the Witch’ a convenient scapegoat to make responsible for the hostile weather conditions and the people’s miseries.

In her seminal book, “Caliban and the Witch”, Silvia Federici explains how during this period the ‘witch-hunts’ targeted women that resisted the established social order such as “the heretic, the elderly, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone, the Obeah woman who poisoned the master’s food and inspired the slaves to revolt”. Federici claims that at that time, the peasantry was expropriated from their communal lands while women were removed from the public sphere and expropriated from their bodies, subsumed to the mandate of reproduction (as a form of unpaid labour). She states that turning women’s bodies into machines for the reproduction of future labourers and soldiers, ultimately enabled both the colonisation of the ‘New World’ and the transition from feudalism to capitalism.

Still today, in India, Brazil, Ghana, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, and other countries thousands of women, albino people and children are accused of witchcraft, criminalized, and even executed under the complicit silence of the international authorities. Meanwhile, the global resurgence of xenophobic, authoritarian, ethno-nationalist and denialist discourses, fosters similar scapegoating processes against the migrant, the asylum seeker, the queer, the black, the poor, the woman.

Following the recent call to construct a memorial to Scotland’s tortured and executed witches, the studio invites participants to design a series of inhabited monuments and architectural allegories at Edinburgh’s Castle. Students will investigate the past and present of witch-hunts, as well as the actors, spaces and forces involved. The designs will explore architecture’s symbolic and performative capacities in the construction of collective memory, but also in the expansion of future forms of political imagination. How can inhabitable monuments contribute to the critical interrogation of the past imperial narratives but also in the expansion of future forms of political imagination?

The course was deveoped at the University of Technology of Sydney by Amaia Sanchez Velasco.

KOOZ What prompted the topic of investigation of the unit? What is the value of revisiting the practice of "witch-hunting" today?

ASV Women’s rights to decide over their bodies are still contested today. On the one hand, the fourth wave of feminism has led to the rise of global feminist intersectional movements reclaiming the end of an economic system based on the exploitation of – bodies and territories– on the verge of (climatic)collapse. On the other hand, we are also witnessing the global resurgence of xenophobic, authoritarian, ethno-nationalist and climate-change denialist discourses.

KOOZ How does the brief approach and challenge the value and role of the monument and its heritage within our contemporary society?

ASV The brief invites students to look at one of the epicentres where women were executed during the Witch hunts: Edinburgh’s Castle. Participants analysed how the site currently celebrates military, religious and colonial powers while it conceals the execution of thousands of –predominantly– women on-site and the orchestrated massacres during the time of colonial expansion.

Based on Giorgio Agamben’s theory of profanation, students designed inhabited monuments that intervened Edinburgh Castle to critically address the construction of collective memory. The inhabited monuments designed by the students are spaces of irresolution, spaces of the encounter of dissonant voices that do not aim to give a singular response, but instead, to open up multiple questions, in words of Donna Haraway’s, monuments that would allow to Staying with the Trouble.

KOOZ What value is attributed to the architectural allegory?

ASV This subject uses the allegory as a research and design method. The Allegorical representation allows to bridge scales and to connect local conditions to global challenges by relating figurative and quotidian elements to existential or structural matters. Drawing on Derrida’s concept of différance, the ‘gap’ between the elements that compose allegorical representation, and their multiple potential meanings constitutes a space of negation where imagination can emerge. This void becomes a contested space where to debunk inherited dichotomies between conservation and extraction, life and death, nature and culture, reality and fiction, science and fabulation.

KOOZ What is for you the power of the architectural imaginary?

ASV In the current paradigm shift we are experiencing; it is more important than ever to engage with the imagination of alternative social contracts. Architectural imagination has the potential to construct forms of desire that divert from technocratic futures of resilience or austerity as the only escape from the current “inevitable” climatic debacle.

Students' projects

"Archival Strike" by Morgan Townsend and Lauren Jewell.

The “Archival Strike” is an architectural typology that slices through institutions that conceal, glorify or displace history, people and their respective narratives. The site where it is first tested is the Edinburgh castle. This tourist destination continues to glorify male military achievements and imperial concourings, whilst concealing the centrality of the site in the Witch Hunt events, in which thousands – of mostly women– were persecuted and executed between the 14th and 18th century.

Following recent events in which museums (in Germany and Australia among others) have returned looted artefacts, the ‘Archival Strike’ steals back stolen artifacts and stories from institutions upon which they have been valued, framed and packaged to society. The project choreographs a series of key rituals which extend along its linear structure combining fabrication and theatricality. As artifacts move through the building, they are exposed to the tension between the bureaucratic processes of analysing and processing the artifacts, and the performative and ritualistic act of ‘farewelling.’ During these rituals the ‘real’ artefacts are returned to their places of origin, while aseptic copies are mass produced, erasing any value linked to its “materiality” or “originality”. The copies are returned to archival institutions as de-valued shells. The manufacturing of these “copies” and their transformations deconstructs the colonial practice of archiving and displaying of “precious” or “exotic” objects, extracted from the “conquered” environments and cultures. In doing so, this project aims to critically interrogate the complicit role of Archives and Museums in the construction of inherited collective memory and its associated power asymmetries.

Students' interviews

KOOZ What questions does your project seek to raise and address?

CM | AI When is life deemed grievable? We aim to make visible the now invisible deaths on site, subverting the control governments place on where and who will be considered worthy of public grieving. We establish an ongoing archive of information that begins to construct a database of collective memory, used not only to memorialise individuals but further, to incite legislative change. As Judith Butler outlined in her text, Frames of War: When is life grievable? “Without grievability there is no life, or rather there is something living that is other than life. Instead, there is a life that will never have been lived, sustained by no regard, no testimony and is ungrieved when lost”.

We also question the rituals which attach themselves to death, interrogating the engrainedresistance to death in the Western world and our continuous need to separate ourselves from the grieving process. Our project begins to examine the architectural form of death in the contemporary. Finally, our proposal explores the role of aesthetics in communicating the allegorical and pragmatic ideas embedded within the studio. The bold and overwhelming red of the intervention is used as a tool to curate an unusual architectural experience, one that heavily contrasts the grey stone of Edinburgh and creates a foreign intervention within the existing cityscape. We adopt a language of repetition and modular form, using it to completely distort the existing ground plane and create a membrane that carves into and builds on the existing typography. This system of tiled surfaces introduces burial towers with mausoleum style burial plots, a morgue, research and meeting spaces and a public archive that becomes an ongoing record of collective memory in Edinburgh.

MT | LJ In our project, we focus on the role of the archive and the museum as architectural typologies that engage with memory through the accumulation of artefacts. These artefacts –tagged and stored like precious jewels– function as valuable ‘props’ that hold stories. However, in this context, artefacts are often separated from their broader social, political and geographical context, displayed in glass cabinets as evidence of a given historical event. This aseptic display of the artefacts conceals the multiple layers of violence that made its display possible.

Our project aims to debunk the aseptic relationship to the artefacts. The ‘Archive Strike’ aims to host critical, performative and active encounters with the artefacts, in order to uncover the concealed violence and the multiple suppressed narrative hidden behind the collection of each artefact. This process of interrogation is organized through a series of rituals that kidnap the artefacts from their current location in the city’s museums to return them to the countries where they were first stolen during the colonial expansion.

KOOZ How does the project challenge the role and value of Edinburgh Castle within our contemporary society?

CM | AI The site currently acts as an historical amusement park. Its systems have been romanticised to deflect from its violence and mass destruction. Military artefacts and armour sit in the shell of the castle for tourists to view, each carefully packaged and curated to conceal their violent core. The marble tiles that pave The Great Hall become a literal and metaphorical representation of this continuing process of concealing and erasure. Within our proposal, the existing museum buildings remain completely intact, however the value of their content is brought into question by changing existing spatial hierarchies and deconstructing engrained systems of erasure, altering the way visitors experience and therefore view the site.

MT | LJ The Castle in its current state only memorializes the witch-hunts events with a small fountain, as if their deaths have a lesser value than their military counterparts. Furthermore, the lack of recognition of the assassination of thousands of women, reflects how public spaces in Western cities still perpetuate the celebration of heroic power figures. Our project responds to this omission of the Witch-Hunt in Edinburgh Castle through the weaponization and re-signification of artefacts that contribute to the celebration of Scotland’s imperial history. Our intervention aims at striking across the institution, establishing a clear gesture of pausing. A strike.

KOOZ Caitlin and Annalise, what are the synergies which you envision developing from the programmatic distribution of a burial site and an investigative research institute?

CM | AI The creation of an investigative research institute interwoven with a burial site aims to render visible the invisible deaths on site. The voices and complex lives of those deemed outcast from society are celebrated, their contributions now included in the wider community. This synergy leads to two outcomes, the creation of a collective memory as well as legislation that enacts social change. The site becomes a place to collectively grieve the lives of those who can not afford to die, or that have no one to grieve for them. Edinburgh's Castle now begins to serve as a space for collective empowerment, campaigning for increased intervention into the social and economic conditions that reinforce a system of erasure.

KOOZ Morgan and Lauren, what is ultimately the ambition of the project beyond the singular artefact/ monument?

MT | LJ The project responds more broadly to the processes of curating, documenting and exhibiting artefacts. The trivial categorisation and display of objects in relation to time-period, location and use, detach the artefacts from their narratives, rendering these objects as “innocent” to viewers as they only exist within the isolated confines of glass boxes and exhibition suites. This display of artefacts perpetuates the glorification of the imperial narratives and negates the violence faced by persecuted minorities. As a result, museums host highly curated exhibitions in which collective memory is determined by historians and thus isolated from their relative contexts. Our project proposes to define a system that allows a critical engagement with the artefacts of past histories, and potential futures, while unveiling the intrinsic violence once concealed by imperial triumphalism. We envision that this “Archival Strike” is the first prototype for a typology of investigation that could be implemented across other sites. An architecture that is constructed to strike through institutions globally to force us to deconstruct our own collective memories and challenge the narratives that have been taught to us by biased institutions and uncover other suppressed narratives.

KOOZ What is for you the power of the architectural imaginary?

CM | AI The arena of the architectural imaginary encourages a questioning of society at large, distilling responses to economic, political and historical issues that ultimately allow us to respond to a shifting social landscape. This studio invites us as designers to reimagine the role of memory in design, challenging the ways we attach value and meaning to spaces, objects and people. The freedom of such a studio allows us to test ideas at an urban scale, exploring unconventional and ‘strange’ interventions whose significance often lies in their deeper metaphorical meaning.

MT | LJ We acknowledge that architecture alone cannot solve the complex, systemic issues of society. However, the speculative nature of architectural imaginary provides a space to investigate and respond to these complex socio-political questions in a methodology that’s liberated from the constraints of a ‘built-form’ project. Through this imaginary, architects have the agency to question existing patriarchal constructs that govern the pedagogy and broader society.