The ultimate act of taking risk in life lays in the proximity to death. When a risk being taken is prone to fail, failure can potentially become the failure to live. These risky moments involve decisions, dreams, imaginings that motivate one to take action. The motivation is strong enough to push one to a fragile border between death and life. In this exposition, I situate the discussion of risk in coal mines, investigating the work of coal miners as a craft through which they develop subversive modes of labour. The story in this exposition starts millions of years ago and gives a fictional geological history of Earth, where the formation of coal plays an important role in the planet’s evolution; coal becomes the political summary of Earth, where various moments of risk lead us down into a coal mine. Through a vertical structure poised on the edge of death and life, and by means of writing and drawing, risk is experimented with using concepts such as imprecision, the materiality of darkness, and the fragility of working with such materiality.

At the nexus of the architectural and environmental humanities issues of decolonization have extended into a consideration of human and more-than-human ecological relations. Given the entanglement of today’s social and environmental crises, we need to decolonise our imaginaries as much as our western European enlightenment predilections when it comes to our architectural habits and habitats. In this co-written paper we ask: How do we explore relational architectural ecologies (Rawes 2016) and engage in creative ecologies (Frichot 2018) from the midst of our pedagogical practices? This team of teacher-researchers presents work undertaken in the design studio context within Critical Studies in Architecture, School of Architecture KTH Stockholm, a division well known for its emphasis on feminist and intersectional theories and practices. Our project, Infrastructural Love, looks to infrastructural systems that support human and more-than-human actors with the aim of rethinking the majoritarian tendencies too often expressed in architecture. We propose to share our developing feminist design (power) tool kit, which aims to challenge the norms of architectural representation so as to re-orientate our points of views on the worlds we daily share with diverse peoples and vibrant things.

Writing architecture is not writingaboutarchitecture, but writing it, making it. It is to create new grounds, sites of actions, and construct characters who build these grounds and change them by inhabiting them critically and performatively. By situating writing in contexts where direct ways of expression are impossible, I investigate how dissident writing can circumvent the bans of an oppressive power by inventing an Aesopian language. Dissident writing is to write with multiple voices and many authors – not all of whom are welcome. To develop a tactic of writing with unwelcome co-authors, i.e. writing with the dominant power, but against it, is what dissidence could bring into writing architecture. In this way, writing dissident architecture deals with two main questions. One is: how to tell a story we cannot tell? And the other: how can this struggle with an impossible narration create a dissident architecture? To investigate these questions, in this text domestic spaces of houses are considered as a key example of performing grounds for dissidents. By going through an experiment of writing situated in the spaces of a demolished house, I discuss how the construction of dissident characters who perform in the house and the application of different genres and experimental writings complicate the house and bring on the writing of a dissident architecture.

This exposition emerged in response to the question of how to engage critically with institutions via various methods of interruption. Al-Croquis is a parody of the mainstream architecture journal El-Croquis. It is a fictitious journal born from a proposal rejected by the editors of El-Croquis, but that nevertheless found a way to continue an institutional existence. This issue, dedicated to the prison, introduces Lieutenant Fontaine, the main character of Robert Bresson’s movie A Man Escaped, as a protagonist of interrupting architecture. Fontaine escapes from the Nazi’s Montluc prison, and his escape plan is investigated as a work of architecture, interrupting the institution of the prison. Appointing the role of architecture to a prisoner who escapes, and studying his applied tools and methods through the lens of architecture work, is a way to expand architecture beyond its disciplinary limits and to develop minor modes of architectural practice. In line with such an expansion, the issue also approaches the prison through various perspectives by means of critical and artistic contributions from guest contributors. 

The self-published journal of architecture, Al-Croquis, and a poster was exhibited at ArkDes exhibition space, as part of the Making Effect exhibition 14-17 September 2017.

Writing architecture is not writing about architecture, but writing it, making it. It is to create new grounds, sites of actions, and construct characters who build these grounds and change them by inhabiting them critically and performatively. By situating writing in contexts where direct ways of expression are impossible, I investigate how dissident writing can circumvent the bans of an oppressive power by inventing an Aesopian language. Dissident writing is to write with multiple voices and many authors – not all of whom are welcome. To develop a tactic of writing with unwelcome co-authors, i.e. writing with the dominant power, but against it, is what dissidence could bring into writing architecture. In this way, writing dissident architecture deals with two main questions. One is: how to tell a story we cannot tell? And the other: how can this struggle with an impossible narration create a dissident architecture? To investigate these questions, in this text domestic spaces of houses are considered as a key example of performing grounds for dissidents. By going through an experiment of writing situated in the spaces of a demolished house, I discuss how the construction of dissident characters who perform in the house and the application of different genres and experimental writings complicate the house and bring on the writing of a dissident architecture.

“Its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics. The individual concern thus becomes all the more necessary, indispensable, magnified, because a whole other story is vibrating within it.” – Gilles Deleuze, ‘Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature’

The story in this presentation commences from the mess, blood, dirt, love that splash on and pollute the neat glossy pages of mainstream architectural representation, texts and images. An odor that tears down the rendered sections of an unbuilt architectural space. A monstrous voice that interrupts the words of professionalism. The story includes but is not limited to feminism. It breaks from mainstream feminism to politics of care and love. It’s about amateurism. The story is about counter-hegemonic practices in architecture that moves along Chantal Mouffe’s ‘strategies of engagement’^[1], but goes awry to tactics of interruption; practices that produce temporal critical alternatives, and thereby disrupt the existing orders and fixed meanings. The performers in this practice are the uninvited, the excluded, the parts that have no part, those who don’t fit into any predefined categories. In the form of ‘minor architecture’ (Stoner/Bloomer), interrupting practices take place in the shadows of ‘major architecture’ (Tafuri) and create situations for the ‘encounter of incompatibilities’ (Rancière) such as fragility and violence. This story examines the encounter of such incompatibilities through practices of interruption.

[1] Mouffe. Ch. 2015. Artistic Strategies in Politics and Political Strategies in Art. In: Malzacher, F. Truth Is Concrete: A Handbook for Artistic Strategies in Real Politics. Berlin: SternbergPress. P.