Architectural Collective Enunciation: A Question of Forming Relays

The reign of ‘Starchitecture’ is over. Good riddance. It has been buried together with the so-called neoliberal era that has dominated economic, political and social systems until (the financial crisis of) 2008. Uncannily, this turn roughly coincided with the cataclysm of our old faculty building. We uphold the hypothesis that the contemporary trends in architecture have emerged as an alternative to the (st)architectural positions dominant since the turn of the century.

To meet the ethical challenge of the Anthropocene the architect’s role needs to undergo a fundamental change from that of a synaptic visionary (a psychological subject whose private meanings and public expressions are crucial to understanding her work and its effects) to a more humble yet audacious clinical/critical cartographer of the material-discursive realm. We propose to catalyse the transition by breaking the bad habit of representationalism. In this sense, we rely on Karen Barad's reinvigoration of the diffractive approach while Isabelle Stengers’s strategy of forming relays saves us from the totalizing and hence fatalistic teleological temptations.

The exhibition diffractively relays five texts to eight diagrams.