In my research AND/ OTHER – the possibilities of emancipating architecture –, I use a method that charts a course through a specific critical comparative analysis combining theory and practice. Besides comparing two contemporary architectural projects (or more) I weave in associations from film, literature theatre, art, and our lived experiences (everyday), how through the sensible perceptions are enacted. By ‘juxtaposing’ fragments of art, architecture and theory my intention is to locate, and discover a common mentality that produce, and instrumentalize, possible emancipatory practices¹. Not a continuous historic line (also not out of nostalgia), but instead bits and pieces of history are being mobilized (Utopistics)² to understand and lay bare this mentality in its working, and its future potential.

I call these critical comparative analysis conversations, and set them up as a multitude of dialogues. It is less about conversations between people, but about ideas and their instrumental devices, how these ideas and devices allow complex, associative, confrontational and experimental readings, similar to what happens in reality, where our behavior is an ambiguous simultaneity of distraction, contemplation, projection, imagination and occurrence. The act of confrontation and re-reading of realities is breaking the consensus machine. My intention is to produces an Atlas of conversations, a mapping through heterogeneous methods of analyzing; image, film, text, writings, photography, media representations, and stories, to understand and clarify the nature and character of the emancipatory in architecture, not what it is, but how it operates in its working. In examining architecture itself, my aim is not to validate a theory; rather, architecture itself generates its ‘own’ theory while dealing with the whole intricate relationship between architecture its environment and its user.

The Extraordinary Life of Elements Review Exhibition Editor Professor Roemer van Toorn, Professor Jüri Soolep, Sepideh Karami, Katja Hogenboom, Hannes Frykholm and Janek Ozmin, UMA School of Architecture, October 2014 consists of six separate reviews collated into a single exhibition. The content was captured on site at the Biennale including record conversations by the review group, interviews with Biennale exhibition contributors, collected media, photographs, sound recordings and videos by the authors. The collated work formed a pluralist, dialogical platform from which the Biennale Exhibition can be viewed. Alongside the printed review panels and video installations, a round table format was used to present various printed media, Biennale exhibition catalogues, and media from participating country pavilions and maps. This table then formed the basis for a debate on the Venice Biennale Exhibition by participating researchers. The Exhibition was mounted in Umeå School of Architecture and formed part of the Arts Campus Open House Research Days November 2014.