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12.09.2022

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

Covers of the two parts

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

30.06.2022

Del Camino al Circuito: Semióticas de la Carretera

Tesla autopilot video

An architectural, technical and cultural analysis of the road as architectural entity. From the link between road, landscape and orientation until its transformation into a circuit where ecologies of asignifying signs nudge the vehicle and its passive passengers, we consider the role and perception of landscape, as well as its effects on the architectural agency... View Article

17.06.2022

Code Poetry and the Production of Minor Architectures in Coded Environments

as·phyx·i·a by Maria Takeuchi, 2015

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

06.06.2022

The Haptic Quality of Urban Sensing: from the Nudge to the Algorithmic Touch Manifold

David Simon, The Wire

Environmentality, as a new form of governmentality, works through an ubiquitous and distributed network of sensing and communication devices, simultaneously capturing and emitting information (Gabrys, 2014). Part of this environmentality works through the nudging of human and non-human bodies, creating an informational surround with the ability to move bodies, push them to action or inhibit... View Article

24.03.2022

Narratives as Minor Architectures’ Repertoire: Affective Images and Haptic Architectural Visions

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Children’s Games, 1560

“This was what literature knew, had always known. Literature tried to open the universe, to increase, even if only slightly, the sum total of what it was possible for human beings to perceive, understand, and so, finally, to be. Great literature went to the edges of the known and pushed against the boundaries of language,... View Article

10.01.2022

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

03.11.2021

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... View Article

24.10.2021

Un Punto Cualquiera Situado hacia el Medio (A Random Point Located towards the Middle)

An opportunity to share the experience of a workshop on Maps as instruments of (dis)orientation led in the School of Arts SUR from 2016 to 2020. Departing from the words from Franz Kafka, «las cosas que se me ocurren no se me presentan por su raíz, sino por un punto cualquiera situado hacia el medio»,... View Article

10.09.2021

Material Fuzziness: Landscape as Operational Background

2109 ECLAS

The natural condition of the human being is exteriority, being exposed and affected. As Spinoza wrote, ‟it is impossible forthe human being not to be a part of nature”. We cannot protect ourselves in isolation and confinement, that will only bring gloom and impotence. This is why the modern biopolitical project has relied on the... View Article

08.05.2019

Cuerpos Anestesiados y Estéticas de lo Clandestino en el Interior Totalizante del Capitalismo Contemporáneo

Ellison - Invisible Man Jeff Wall 01

El ser humano es pura exterioridad. Nuestra condición natural es la exposición pues, tal y como escribía el filósofo holandés Spinoza, “es imposible que el ser humano no sea una parte de la naturaleza”. No podemos protegernos en el aislamiento y el encierro. Siempre somos en nuestros encuentros, de donde se sigue que siempre estamos... View Article

15.12.2017

El Gran Río. Resistencia, rebeldía, rebelión, revolución

El Gran Río. Resistencia, rebeldía, rebelión, revolución fue un proyecto expositivo desarrollado en el Círculo de Bellas Artes en 2017 para afrontar el concepto de conflicto desde múltiples enfoques, interrelacionando revoluciones a lo largo de la historia, buscando las motivaciones que desembocan en formas de resistencia y sus consecuencias, y desentrañando rebeldías pasadas y presentes.... View Article

10.09.2017

Exception and the Rebel Body: the Political as Generator of a Minor Architecture

Bus seating chart for Rosa Parks 04767_2000_001

Following the Iranian elections in 2009, the city of Tehran experienced a wave of protests to denounce alleged irregularities in the electoral process. As the streets were lined with police chasing protesters, they climbed to the city’s rooftops to express their disagreement. Thus, every night a chorus of voices intoned the same chants their parents’... View Article