We are a collective from Brazil with members from different Brazilian states and universities, that approaches the Anthropocene, the multispecies studies, and the afro-indigenous cosmopolitics from the perspective of architecture and urbanism to reflect on the implications of these practices for the extensive planetary transformations and ecological collapse, and to speculate on possible modes of environmental protection, regeneration, and historical reparations and care for the e/Earth.
Lexicon
Chronicles from Extraction to Demolition
Architecture in the Anthropocene: Impasses and Possibilities
✎ Lexicon of practices and thoughts based on encounters with afro-indigenous spatial practices and cosmopolitics. From A to Z, the Lexicon proposes to establish a new semantic set of words and perspectives for architects, in a way that is attentive to the decolonization of architecture, in chorus with what the counter-colonialist and quilombola thinker Nego Bispo proposes as a "war of denominations".
☞ Installation at the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam 2024 - Nature of Hope
☞ See the Lexicon
✎ Architecture and its enormous civil construction chain have profound implications in the climate emergency process. The cycles of civil construction revolve around extensive planetary extraction and the disposal of the rubble that is intended to be invisible. Against the magical and illusionist perception that infrastructures of modernity promote, we present a set of chronicles with different perspectives (real, fictional, or speculative) on the description of the cyclical process of extraction-demolition in civil construction. The chronicle is attentive to the situated dimension of our everyday life, up to the smallest part of our experience on Earth. In this minor sense, the chronicle can re-establish a necessary consciousness of people and planet and, at the same time, elicit through the smallest things a full range of planetary problems.
☞ Installation at the Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa 2022 - Terra
☞ Published in Cycles - Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa
✎ The consciousness of the Anthropocene highlights the collapse of the structures that founded Western modernity and, therefore, the impossibility of continuing the ways of life that it legitimized. In this new geological epoch, as long as we are aware of the ongoing catastrophe and that yet to come, not only the separation between Nature and Culture becomes unsustainable, but also every human and humanist operation of infinite and free appropriation of so-called natural resources. This discipline, therefore, aims to test possibilities of inhabiting – and of designing and (de)constructing – that overflow the old dualisms and the violent and extractive colonial-Western models. In contrast, we propose a dialogue – through debate and through the project – with afro-indigenous and multi-specific practices, ideas and sensibilities.
☞ Course carried out in 2022 within an inter-university network: Escola da Cidade, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro e Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro.