Invisible Maps: Minor Architectures as Ecologies of Signs

Study for 'Blind Man's Buff' (1811), by Sir David Wilkie (1785-1841)

We cannot avoid the touch of the world. Presence emerges out of an ecology of signs; traces with different textures and surfaces that index any given encounter. That’s why we can think of embodied or invisible maps which are not drawn (inscribed) on paper, but on our bodies. They are affective images as Spinoza defined them, compasses orienting our worldliness.

A session with Kristanti Paramita at the London Metropolitan University, organized by Beatrice De Carli and moderated by Ektoras Arkomanis.

12.09.2022 [Writings]

Windowish Practices, Unreadable Backgrounds and Raw Semiotics. Tracing Minor Architectures and Ecologies of Signs in Women’s Writing

Minor architectures can be defined as an open set of spatial practices and know-hows based on the agency of bodies. While these practices escape representation, codification or measurement, they have a fertile relation with literature. After framing this relationship, we analyze the work of three women writers (Carmen Martín Gaite, Ali Smith and Toni Morrison)… View Article

17.06.2022 [Talks]

Code Poetry and the Production of Minor Architectures in Coded Environments

With the Internet of Things and the popularisation of AI, our living environments are becoming coded environments: every singularity is inscribed in its digital fabric. These informational media are “containers of possibility” (Durham Peters, 2016), shaping what’s possible and what’s not (to do, to build or even to imagine). As architectural production becomes information management… View Article

10.01.2022 [Writings]

Nothing but a few signs, like stars in an immense black night: clandestinity and night-faring practices in the Underground Railroad

Edwin Hergesheimer, Map showing the distribution of the slave population of the southern states of the United States. Compiled from the census of 1860. Washington: Henry S. Graham, 1861

The text focuses on how clandestinity, understood as the articulation of spaces of secrecy and invisibility, is traversed by a singular form of architectural knowledge centered on embodied practices. A set of minor know-hows playing with the lines of the visible world while understanding the material effects of individual and collective bodies, all founded on… View Article