 Welcome. It's been a it's a big week. We just had Ananya Roy on Monday and tonight I'm just completely really thrilled to welcome Adrian Nahoud to be presenting his work both as an educator, as a theorist, as an architect, as a researcher, as the Dean of the School of Architecture at the RCA in London and also I think tonight we'll be speaking about his work creating the inaugural edition of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial which will be held in November 2019. Adrian is a colleague, a friend, but also a kind of an intellectual sort of partner for for me, for myself, but also so many of our faculty and I, we were you know speaking recently about the two schools and this kind of interesting parallel and network that's being woven between the two schools thinking about new forms of practice, thinking about how as architects we can bring a kind of critical stance to questions of scale, questions of environment and kind of act and engage politically our discipline. And tonight I also want to take this opportunity to celebrate CCCP because it is the annual CCCP lecture but also because this year marks the 10th anniversary of a small but oh so mighty program. Just as you know co-directed by two of our most kind of valued faculty and thinkers and here at the school Felicity Scott and Mark Rasuda who together are you know have crafted this unbelievable program that is by the way taking over the world in some power or certain kinds of certain parts of the world certainly the critical curatorial part of the world and and I think that unbelievable again network of friendships of collaborators of thinkers I think is becoming, is transforming the discipline from within and its practice in so many ways. So to really properly introduce Adrian I want to welcome Mark to say a few words as well and please join me in welcoming Adrian as well. Thank you all for coming out and thanks to Adrian for agreeing to deliver this the yearly CCCP lecture. I'm sure you will all soon grasp if it is not already clear why we are excited to have Adrian here. By way of introduction I want to point to a few things you should know about Adrian. He studied in Australia where he was a brilliant and charismatic student and I can I can attest to this the first time I met him was at a conference he organized as a student he became a scholar researcher writer and opened a design practice all was looking good a nice life and then the first sign of trouble he moved to London where he became the director of the MA program at the Center for Research at Goldsmiths and worked with the forensic architecture project. He then became the director he then became the director of the urban design program at the Bartlett School second sign of trouble people are now a little concerned then he is suddenly at the RCA as the Dean of School of Architecture third sign of deepening trouble alarm bells are ringing and his friends are concerned and finally he decides he will direct the first Sharjah architecture triennial so asking Adrian to join us here is less invitation than it is intervention he may seem like a reasonable man but really totally unhinged an insane amount of work and responsibility so we're feeling pretty good about this you know we're giving Adrian a break to at least momentarily stop this insanity yet this brief flickering moment of self-satisfaction quickly seeds to doubt as it does because although the language and conception of intervention is not entirely unjustified or inaccurate it is perhaps misplaced I mean that from his previous work to his Reconception of the urban design program at the Bartlett to his introduction of research ventures at the ace at the RCA on for example existential territories to his curating of the Sharjah Triennial and the rights of future generations it is Adrian who is intervening he is an interventionist as it were in his research in his scholarship in the flurry of essays and exhibitions that he has recently authored in his labor in and on institutions his work appears as a coherent series of discursive disciplinary theoretical and professional interventions into architecture a series of interventions organized around politics environment climate change and territory or put slightly differently his work intervenes between and within the relationships affiliations associations logics of connection and dependency that link architecture to environment into politics and just to carry this thought a little further we also see in his work an idea of architecture that itself intervenes at various scales take this line that opens a recent text of Adrian's there is a strange sympathy between the atmospheric particles that float through the sky and the human beings that migrate across the ground and then across the sea through this and myriad other strange sympathies Adrian's work allows us to read architecture between the scale of the particle and the scale of global migration between say Neemeyer's building project in Lebanon and the scale of state organization between the descriptive climate model and the politics of imputed causality between cybernetic networks and Chile and neoliberal ism or as a trap that coordinates structures and intervenes in the relationship between predator and prey. Thank you again and please join me in welcoming Adrian again. Thank you so much for incredible introduction and thank you for the invitation to present here the CCCP lecture. It's an honor to be here and it means a great deal to me to have this opportunity. I'd especially like to thank Dean Amal Andros, Mark and Felicity for the invitation. I also want to acknowledge colleagues like Godafreda Pereira, Lumumba de Arping, Moed Musbahi, Kasia Walachek, Beth Hughes and David Kim, whose thoughts and contributions will play a role in what I'm going to present tonight. I'm going to spend about 50 minutes discussing the inaugural edition of the Sharjah architecture triangle. It's a kind of work in progress. I know you're having midterms right now. So this is a kind of midterm presentation. So I look forward to the feedback afterwards. I've divided the presentation into two sections with a dedication that you can see here. So the first section deals with what I call the preconditions for doing an exhibition like this. The preconditions are those problems posed by a post-colonial geography, by the dislocation and destruction of archives and by the architectural exhibition itself in terms of its political economy. Its conventional format and its contents. In other words, the kinds of things you might be interested in when curating an exhibition of this type regardless of the theme. The last part of the section, which is also the longest part of the presentation, is a reading of anthropological work on indigenous dwelling. For the last three years, I've been trying to come to terms with the way that anthropologists talk about architecture. The work prior to that on scale was really about how to do research. The work on anthropology is my way of coming out the question of design. The motivation for this work is to try to radically decolonize what we mean by architecture and design. That process has a goal, which is to mobilise architectural education, practice and research around alternative socio-political forms to think the life of form in regards to the form of life. The second section looks at the proposal I made for the inaugural edition of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial and its theme, Rights of Future Generations. The second part of the second section, which sounds like a Julius Eastman track title, explores some of the initiatives that we are undertaking, some of the discussions that we hope will become projects. And then I'm going to conclude by making some general statements. OK, so the exhibition takes place in Sharjah, which is one of the United Arab Emirates. The city has played a crucial role in the networks of trade and exchange that have linked the East African coast to the Indian Ocean and to Southeast Asia for centuries. The diasporic networks of Sufis, Hadramots, Bengalis and many others link the three land masses that surround Sharjah, the African continent, the Arabian Peninsula, the Asian subcontinent as well as the Malaysian and Indonesian archipelago. The intention behind the establishment of the Sharjah Architecture Triennial is to try to generate an indigenous critical dialogue on architecture and urbanism that looks at and builds on this historical network. So there are a number of different ways of designating the field of the project, some are geographical. For example, the idea of a region, which I find a bit paternalistic, you can put a hundred Swiss and Italian architects in the Asenale every two years and it's still an international exhibition. Why? Because in this context, identity is the special burden of others who need to perform their cultural particularity in specific kinds of ways. So as many of you know, in the architecture exhibition there is a kind of curatorial gaze in what I infer to be the non-regional part of the world that expects the regional part of the world to conform to a certain curatorial semiotic that over identifies with cultural tropes and stereotypes around the vernacular and development especially. These racialized discourses overcode architectural representation and expose themselves therefore to wholly legitimate critiques on the grounds of their essentialism and their paternalism. It's fair to say that in many ways the large-scale exhibition is still a 19th century project. At the same time, Chandra is an opportunity to create spaces for architects, artists and scholars that have been denied opportunities because of where they live, because of where they are from, because of who they are, because of what they have done, written or said. I would describe the scope and terms of the exhibition then as an attempt to look at problematic conditions rather than geographies say. Though problematic conditions will always have geographical elements, they will also have de-territorialized components, elements that conflate scales, the near and far, the small and large, the weak and strong, but also importantly in light of this theme, relationships between the contemporary and the non-contemporary. So perhaps the most challenging of these preconditions is the legacy of the archival destruction and dislocation, a kind of precondition that is unique to former colonies and outposts of empire. So on June 7, 1962, on the eve of Algerian independence, the dean and the head of and the head librarian of the University of Algiers set fire to the University Library, destroying 500,000 books in order to prevent them from falling into the hands of the Front Libération Nationale and others fighting for Algerian freedom from French colonial rule. During the first year of the Nakba, some 70,000 volumes were looted from Palestinian libraries and collections. Eight years later, on Thursday the 29th of May, 1956, one year prior to Ghana's independence, the governor's office of the Gold Coast instructs the colonial office to begin the process of separating, purging and relocating and obliterating all the traces of documents that might embarrass Her Majesty's government, her secret collaborators or the leaders, politicians and officials of soon to be independent states. Titled Operation Legacy, the Empire set about selecting, burning and concealing its remains. It was one of the most systematic, comprehensive and spectacular destructions of historical records known in our time. First in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, then Ghana, then early in 1957 Malay, now Malaysia, then Tanganyika, now Tanzania in 1961, Uganda in 1962, Kenya in 1963, and so it went. Archives were incinerated or migrated by the lorry load. On the 17th of December, 2011, 170,000 volumes of the Institute of Egypt, established in 1789, were destroyed by a stray mulit of cocktail thrown in the wake of clashes and the aftermath of revolution. Until the fire, the contents of this building, 200,000 volumes organized into physics, natural history, political economy, literature and arts and dating back to its establishment by Napoleon remained a mystery to most. In the wake of the fire, priceless manuscripts emerged from their concealment littering the streets. The examples are endless. I mean, I could continue for days, but the archive and its loss is not a theme of the exhibition. In fact, it is very simply the unavoidable precondition of doing work in the aftermath of destruction, in the aftermath of destruction's destruction. And it has very practical consequences for research. But it has also led to the emergence of artistic and intellectual practices that begin with the impossibility of testimony, with the unavailability of memories, with the traumatic blind spots and lacuna that characterize the post-colonial condition. The vast distortions that this history of destruction produces form another precondition of the project. What is left behind is often the testimony of the state, biasing towards a performative mode of international politics, captured in conferences and large-scale events and overcoded by the state or its super and intergovernmental counterparts. Architecture biennials and triangles are a relatively recent phenomena. The first Venice architecture biennial, as you know, only took place in 1980. The coming year will be witness, we will be witness, to a veritable explosion in the number of large-scaled exhibitions. Oslo, Seoul, Chicago, Venice, Lisbon, Shenzhen, Talon, Sao Paulo, Pamplona, Santiago, Buenos Aires, Asuncion and Sharjo. The large-scale architecture exhibition has simply not had the same kind of history of anti-colonial or later post-colonial perspectives in comparison to the visual arts, nor was there an equivalent to the alternative circuit of cultural production, institutions, events, journals and magazines that emerged within the visual arts, poetry, theater and literature in the post-colonial period. For example, the first graphics biennial of Ljubljana, which took place in 1955, the Alexandria biennial of the Mediterranean in 1959, which I've only just discovered, the first Arab biennial held in Baghdad in 1974 in the context of the brief emergence of the United Arab Republic, through to more familiar events like Havana in 1984, but also to well-known exhibitions like Art and Artifact here in New York, curated by Susan Vogel in 1988, which I've spoken about before, to Magician de la Terre, the Santa Pompidou, to Catherine David's documenter 10, to Ocquist Documentary 11. And it's really thrilling to see how much work has been done in recent years to start to understand this history better, to understand the role that the visual arts played in establishing new networks of solidarity in the post-independence period, indeed during the period of decolonization itself. The Sharjah Art Biennial has been going for 28 years and very consciously builds on this history and a network of cultural production that exists with a significant degree of autonomy from global centres of institutional power. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it leads them in many ways. That history, that network, that working through of history simply has not occurred within our discipline. So this is an exciting moment, not just for the Sharjah triangle, but for many of the other events that will be taking place at the same time, because I know many of my colleagues and many of my co-curators feel the same way, at least recognise the same kinds of problems. And so the reason I mention this is because there is a risk that as a curator, which I'm not, but I'm playing at, one's role, there's a risk that we see one's role simply supplying content to a pre-existing structure and therefore of working within a pre-existing political economy. In my admittedly, hardly exhaustive experience of attending architectural exhibitions, it has often seemed to be the case that there is a lack of awareness of the preconditions that often over-determines the content of the exhibition. And this is not just true for the broader conceptual and practical issues I've mentioned, but also with respect to all of the apparatus and paraphernalia of the exhibition itself, from the role of public relations, companies, journalists, communication strategies, visual identification, publishers, distributors, etc. There is a kind of default machinery of narration, circulation and value production that requires a huge effort to try to overcome in even the most modest of ways. The hegemony of the English language is an excellent example. So decolonizing the exhibition will mean more than putting black and brown people in charge of curating exhibitions. It will mean more than declarations of inclusion, participation and diversity. It must also mean subjecting the institution to a critical analysis directed toward a reorganization of its power and ultimately to the development of alternative infrastructures for the production of value in architecture. In its most general terms, we might understand the scope of this particular exhibition as a refraction between three kinds of polls, climate change, architecture and colonialism. But more specifically the kinds of diagrams, assemblages and machines that are the real sites of struggle over vectors of collective subjectivation, their orientation, their stability and their durability. At the heart of this is an attempt to expand the idea of architecture beyond its identification with building or more accurately perhaps to render less exclusive the purchase that buildings have over the history of architecture in order to incorporate alternative perspectives on modes of existence, on ecological modification, on environmental transformation. The challenge we have is how to capture something that probably captures the wrong word, depict something like the long term intergenerational modification of an ecosystem when these modifications are so subtle as to evade the ability of conventional forms of architectural representation to depict them, a problem that is all the more challenging as soon as one tries to represent something like a mode of existence. I'll talk a little bit about that later. The distinction between the human and the environment is a particularly Western European construct. It's presumed universality has been subject to long standing critique so I'm not going to rehearse those arguments here. What I would like to argue though is that in this separation between the human and the environment that it finds its ultimate analogy, its ultimate expression, if not its ultimate source in architecture, particularly in the dominance of the concept of shelter. Deconstructing the idea of architecture as shelter is the most important and the most difficult step in decolonizing what we mean when we say architecture. The goal in doing so is to move some way toward acknowledging the vast existential and metaphysical diversity of human and non-human societies including the way that their rights might be articulated. So I want to try to rehearse the outlines of that hypothesis for you now. Take you through the argument. So architecture's primary assumption, protection from the natural environment is a kind of fundamental human need. Architecture's primary role then is to somehow satisfy this need. Therefore let's grant the following. Shelter appears as the solution to the problem of protection from an environment. The problem is a kind of negative situation. Humans are cold, they're wet, they're exposed to predation, they lack privacy, etc. Shelter resolves this negative situation. So according to this assumption that its origin architecture emerges as a solution to a practical problem. Even if it gives rise to subsequent problems they are somehow of a lesser importance. For example how to correctly deploy the ionic, how to organize a school layout, how to encourage social interaction in an office lobby, etc, etc. Shelter is in some way behind or below or above them all such that if you don't have that first you can't have the others later. Now posing the problem in this way presupposes a subject-object or if you like environment-inhabitant or even environment-organism distinction. Now this ontological distinction separates the environment from the inhabitant. Further it frames the environment in terms of perceived risk. Now one objection you could raise is that this doesn't offer any useful insights into societies that don't partition their world in the same way and there are many. Now one way out of this might be to claim that all the other things that architecture may or may not do are any possible once the rudimentary requirements of Shelter are fulfilled. In other words if architecture has any purpose beyond resolving the problem of exposure to potential harm posed by the environment this purpose can only be fulfilled once the problem of Shelter is resolved in this way. Shelter becomes and there is no other way to put it the fundamental precondition for architecture and this is maybe unsurprising buildings look like shelters stubbornly or at least for most of us. In society against the state in society against the state Pierre Closter has this to say it has already been remarked that archaic societies are almost always class negatively under the heading of lack. They are societies without a state societies without writing societies without history. Now the notion of a subsistence economy conceals within it the implicit assumption that if primitive societies do not produce a surplus this is because they are somehow incapable of doing so entirely absorbed as they are in producing the minimum necessary necessity for survival for subsistence. Actually what does subsistence mean? It means living in a permanently fragile equilibrium between elementary needs and the means for satisfying them. A society with a subsistence economy then is one that barely manages to feed its members and thus finds itself at the mercy of the slightest natural accident such as drought or flood. A decline in its resources would automatically make it impossible to feed everyone. In other words archaic societies do not live. They survive. Their existence is an endless struggle against starvation for they are incapable of producing a surplus because of a technological and beyond that cultural deficiency. Nothing is more persistent than this view of primitive society. And at the same time nothing is more mistaken. Shelter is to space what subsistence is to economy. Perhaps the first thing to say is that contrary to our use of the term many of the indigenous societies described as described as having subsistence economies were actually the very first leisure societies the first affluent societies to use Marshall Salon's phrase. The concept of shelter then is a symptom of a certain way of viewing the world that is violently projected onto the world. One that leads us to think about housing in terms of numerical supply that makes us see homelessness in terms of spatial scarcity or makes us see homelessness as shelterlessness as if home and shelter was synonymous. It draws our attention away from alternative forms of domestic life because it frames the problem of domesticity in terms of a universal and primordial need and numerical lack that must be addressed in numerical terms without ever putting into question the social models that underpin it without trying to grasp in all their richness and complexity the forms of collective subjectivity that architecture proposes and naturalizes. Shelter converts life from an existential problem into a numeric geometric biological one. The image of the relief agency tend in situations of post-natural disaster and post-conflict returns like the primitive heart of the past to haunt every building with a premonition of its origin, its present and its future. In the favelas of Rio, Le Corbusier famously found evidence for the archaic persistence of a primitive type which he celebrated for its unadorned modesty and straightforward character. In fact, architects have often seen settlements of these kinds as archaic vestigial legacies of primitive buildings. The same is true of anthropology, which has tried to derive theories of Neolithic societies from contemporary indigenous modes of existence as if they had not been shaped by centuries, sometimes millennia of contact with empire. In all these cases, the allegedly primordial character of the shelter carries a kind of erotic charge for the architect's gaze. The gaze is compelled, but the evidence it falls upon never fails to confirm its own narcissistic paternalistic projections and fantasies. And no sight has been more guilty of perpetuating these kinds of projections than the large-scale architectural exhibition, which compelled by the now obligatory designator international takes great pains to include more diverse forms of cultural representation that must include forms of summer renovation or new school buildings in areas marked by poverty without ever unpacking the networks of NGO funding that these projects rely upon or the forms of cultural capital these images produce as they circulate through metropolitan centers and their systems of value production, forms of cultural capital that only those mobile enough to move between these two poles are able to benefit from. It is as if shelter more than any other concept secures the moral value of architecture. It is that self-evident good that architecture bequeaths to the world. It is what ultimately saves it from a more critical appraisal of the political economy that it is installed within and which it continues to serve. Any decolonization of architecture is going to have is going to have to reckon with this moral, conceptual, political legacy. Its legacy is that it preformats our attention. It directs it away from the question of modes of existence. It relegates their diversity, their temporality, their metaphysics, their ecological concepts to a problem of the hut. A term that is now so discredited within contemporary archaeology and anthropology as to elicit shame. So let's take a more or an example from the ethnographic literature to try to make this idea of a mode of existence more concrete. So this is an image of the aftermath of a fire in a palm oil plantation in Borneo where one of the studios in our environmental architecture program at the LCA is conducting a four year long investigation. So in looking at images like this, we recall the violence of extractive processes taking place across the planet, the legacy of environmental destruction, of degradation, pollution, etc. But in all the discussions that have taken place recently, especially with respect to what is called the sixth great extinction event, we have completely failed to pay attention to something that should be close to our hearts as architects, which is the extinction not only of certain animal species, but certain modes of existence. So this is a long house, a dwelling often found in Borneo and Papua. The long house is an entire building, an entire village in a single building. It's over 100 meters long and divided along its length into a circulation and domestic space. This image dated 1910 to 1912 was taken by a Finnish sociologist. So according to Peter Metcalf, who's written one of the key ethnographic accounts of the long house, newborn children are evenly distributed to every corporate group in the long house. A child be born of the social group, not the couple, able couples with less children could take new ones. As for the building, every 15 to 20 years, the entire thing is torn down and a new one is raised. Now what I wanted to try to do is just draw your attention to a completely typical, unexceptional aspect of the building, the line in the joints between the floorboards. Now architects spend a lot of their time thinking about lines and joints, about their craftsmanship, their intrinsic value, even their truth. And I wish I could say these kinds of things about this joint. But actually when you look at it, it's probably pretty unexceptional. After all, the planks are uneven, they're crooked, they're rudely butted together. It's fair to say that most of us would think this was the mark of no design at all, the mark of no skill, no craftsmanship. Or you might consider yourself to be among the enlightened ones. You might argue that on the contrary, its very basic quality is precisely what makes it valuable. That perhaps its direct, modest, bare, unadorned quality is what makes it intrinsically self-evidently truthful. As you can see, there are all kinds of value judgments that we can make about this rather typical, unexceptional feature of the building. In the case of the Longhouse from Borneo, this joint is actually rather exceptional, I would say astonishing even. But in order to recognize its value, we need to try to do something which is in some minimal form to take up the perspective of the social group that lives in the Longhouse. In the case of the Longhouse from Borneo, this joint marks the boundary between neighboring corporate groups. So the line describes an allocation of space to the corporate group in question, not its ownership. So when I said that the Longhouse as an entire village in a single building, I lied. That's not quite correct. In fact, it is an entire village in a single room, well, at least from our perspective, or in a series of rooms from the perspective of its inhabitants. In fact, it depends on how you define the room to begin with. More accurately, it is only a single room if you define a room by the presence of walls. If you define a room as a three-dimensional envelope of privacy, it is in fact multiple rooms. So each corporate group occupies one of the rooms along the sequence. Now at this point, you might ask, how can you have privacy without the presence of walls? Well, every corporate group acts as if it is prohibited from observing its neighbors. And I deliberately use the subjunctive mode as if here to point to the fact that this is a description of observations in an ethnographic context, one that registers a comparative difference and a distance between the ethnographer and the informant. It's not an ontological claim nor canopy. So to sensibilities that we are more familiar with, it is as if the corporate group exists in a condition that is completely devoid of privacy. Instead, it feels like a very intimate condition. After all, it looks like a single room abate a rather long one. But then our thinking, feeling and looking has been shaped by other kinds of histories. So can we trust our thinking, feeling and looking to make sense of theirs? Is privacy possible without walls? Well, it seems as if it is. Peter Metcalf's book on the Longhouse retells a common occurrence, families that might live every single day of their lives in what we would describe as the same space, merely 10 or 15 meters away from each other, will refuse to acknowledge each other when they are in the domestic zone of the Longhouse. According to Metcalf's account, if they bump into each other outside of the house, they will often exclaim, it's really so great to see you haven't seen you for a long time. Metcalf perhaps wisely refrains from any further speculation. But to my mind, the unanswerable questions simply multiply. Do the corporate groups of the Longhouse act as if they refuse to look? Do they actually assiduously avert their eyes? Or do they act as if they refuse to acknowledge that they look? Do they act as if they look but refuse to see? Is that the purpose of the exclamatory greeting? Is the exclamatory greeting a figure of speech? Does it point to something more profound? Is there a difference? Etcetera, etc. The point here is not to assume that we have access to some truth behind this, but to point to the differences and complications as a site at ethnographic speculation about alternative modes of existence. Indeed, what would be the difference then between looking and seeing? And what does it mean in terms of our concept of privacy or theirs? So I'm not sure it's just a simple joint in the floor of a dwelling. If we visited, we would barely notice it. Indeed, the curious thing is and this may well be the case that the corporate groups of the Longhouse barely notice it as well. It may well be that this joint could just be a completely typical unexceptional aspect of their dwelling. It's just the way they live if one were living as part of that mode of existence unique to the Longhouse. The comparative method operates in the opposite direction just as equivocally. Indeed, as Patrice Manigelier has argued, comparative anthropology is just a form of rigorous equivocation. It's just another name for equivocation as practice. If social forms are never fully present to themselves, let alone to ethnographers, let alone to architects, let alone to architects reading about ethnography, what about more familiar kinds of conditions? Dwellings of the kinds that might be more familiar to you and I that depend on walls for their privacy. If that is the case, does that mean that we act as if we believe that our own eyes are not to be trusted? Do we distrust our own seeing, looking and feeling? After all, if our seeing, looking and feeling could be trusted, what need would we have of walls? Is the wall a mark of the eye's unreliability? Should we read the absence of a wall as a sign that the eyes of others can be trusted? Or perhaps what kind of society is so lacking in trust that it needs to build these physical things called walls to block the sight of others to do the work of socially unreliable eyes? And indeed, as you look through the anthropological literature and architecture, literature on forms of dwelling that are considered so lacking in merits, so underdeveloped by architectural scholars, they are almost completely absent from histories of architecture. What you will find is that the difference between the physical materiality of architectural elements and a multiplicity of customs, habits, behaviors, actions and rituals were somehow substitutable. It is as if they were interchangeable. One always ready and poised to do the work of the other. In a wonderful reference that was only pointed out to me yesterday by my colleague David Kim, Yale Law School Professor and Civil Rights activist Robert Cove writes the following. The very act of constituting tight communities about common ritual and law is jurist generative by a process of juridical mitosis. It seems to me that one important way of thinking alternative modes of existence is to begin to map the couplings and disarticulations of what Cove calls the jurist generative and what we might more simply call design. Take this abate rather speculative assemblage of eyes, glances, habits, rituals, laws and architecture and tell me how one could separate them from the mode of existence in which they operate. Any other kind of designation of value is little more than an exercise in institutional authority in the power to depict, to credit and to judge. The only solution then is to try to allow the very definition of architecture within the mode of existence that we define as our own such as the primordial function of shelter or the exclusive association with building to be thrown into doubt, to enter into an equivocal relationship with others. After all, if a complex set of interpersonal social actions are organized around a joint in the floor of a longhouse, then what about a stick in the ground? What about upturned leaves? What about twisted branches? What about a geoglyph? What about a painting? Where does architecture start and the environment begin? Existing curatorial and exhibition making strategies for large architectural exhibitions rely on formats that were developed in predominantly Western European and North American contexts. These formats reproduce preconceptions on what counts as architecture and how architectural value is established by reinforcing aesthetic norms, exising environmental or social contexts, or by focusing on Western definitions of technical accomplishment and virtuosity. For example, the way transformations of the environment by indigenous peoples do not take the form of building, or the way that non-Western architecture is constrained to questions of craft or the vernacular. As a consequence, the concepts, rituals, aesthetics, environment, social contexts and technical systems that characterize non-Western architectural cultures, are either lost or forced to conform to existing models. In its most simple terms, rights of future generations claims that present generations have a responsibility of future generations and that this responsibility primarily pertains to the state of the planet, its ecosystems and its environment. The claim emerges due to a growing recognition that the planet, its ecosystems and its environments are being destroyed and that this destruction severely constrains the ability of future generations to live their lives. The rights claim appears primarily in the preambular parts of conventions and treaties, which speaks to two things. First, that it remains largely aspirational and second, that it presents conceptual difficulties that have posed issues for practical legal implementation. And this challenge is usually expressed in two very simple ways. First, in terms of definition, how do you define a future generation and second, representation. So who will speak on behalf of future generations in the present? The UN Charter, as you can see here, refers to succeeding generations immediately in its preamble. What the reference to future generations marks here may simply be the following, that these rights being claimed in the present shall continue to exist and apply in the future. Which is to say that rights of future generations might be fought in their weakest form, simply as a kind of sign of the perpetuity of rights themselves. Conversely, you might also argue that the futurity in being marked is not a claim for the longevity of rights, but rather that futurity itself, the very potential to make plans and organize activity around the goal is profoundly human. The forward-looking orientation of rights is as a registration of this human quality. Or in a similar vein, as a legal scholar Samuel Schleffer argues, the very idea that things will continue after we die is a kind of precondition of what matters to us in the present, therefore by extension what should be accorded rights and therefore that we in the present imagine that future persons will experience or be subject to a comparable sense of importance and by extension responsibility. Rights are often seen as requiring a corresponding duty, which seems to pose a problem when the duty's reciprocation exists outside of the lifetime of the rights bearer. In a recent book, Matthias Fritsch attempts to reconcile both normative and ontological cases for theories of intergenerational justice by developing a concept of turn-taking and asymmetrical reciprocity in response to this problem, where asymmetry refers to a kind of passing on of the obligation to future generations, which in philosophical terms I think is a really rich idea in so far as it can be read to imply that either the right never returns to you because you pass it on, or more provocatively perhaps that its chain of bearers are some important ways substitutable for each other, a view that would trouble a straightforward linear view of generations succeeding each other. I want to try to point out something else that I find unique about the claim of rights of future generations, neither in terms of its legal normativity or its ontological implications, but rather in terms of the kinds of political work that it might be made to do. So rather than try to settle on a rigorous definition, I want to try to describe this in terms of the productive tension that it produces between the idea affiliation and alliance. So a future generation can be easily understood on a visceral level because human beings have children and we have experiences of children being born. I know families are machines for reproducing all kinds of neurosis and especially in respect to intergenerational relationships, their channels for the transmission of inherited wealth, social capital, social credit, and therefore they play a really important role in perpetuating inequality, and we can discuss that later. But, and this is also important, they are also sites of enormous effective investment, attachment, care, commitment, and it must also be said love. So the intergenerational perspective is also a site of immense conflict and violence, as in anti miscagenation laws, but also as in stolen generations, forced removal and adoptions. So a future generation occupies an uncertain space insofar as it breaks with affiliation while allowing for the various attachments, structures of care and commitments affiliation to be invested in it. This slippage between the visceral effective register of affiliation and the temporal uncertainty of alliances with those yet to come becomes a productive site of political work. So too with the scale attention between the plurality of conceptions of rights, futures and generations in distinct sites of social struggle and the claim for rights of future generations as such. Both are examples of what the political theorist Ernesto Leclerc would call chains of equivalence in reference to his work on left wing populism. That is to say their concept or better yet, refrains that allow specific sites of struggle with their particular demands and claims to see themselves as co extensive with the entire terrain of social struggle. That process has another name, that name is solidarity. Okay, some of the projects. So the commissioning process has been less about selecting work or architects and I think more about establishing small communities of inquiry around certain conditions that you know, we think are important. I can give you a really small selection of the kinds of discussions that are taking place rather than talk about the work themselves because this is as I said before, a midterm crit. Okay. So the Nuara canvas is an eight by 10 meter painting produced by the Nuara people of Northwestern Australia. It was produced as evidence of land tenure in a native title claim. After the saltwater collection, we believe it was only the second time in Australian history that a cultural artifact was used as evidence of land tenure. This painting is the most astonishing thing and unsettles common understandings of the relationship to country, of the intersection between European and indigenous legal orders between the territory and notions of its representation. Law in indigenous Australian society is subject to secrecy and processes of initiation. In order to produce the painting, the different custodians of the law needed to make a decision on how much of the law to reveal to each other and to the native title commission. Each of them then go on to paint a particular section of the painting in collaboration. The painting then is an adaptation of an indigenous legal order that is calibrated to the requirements of a European legal order. Moreover, the custodians require that the commission take place in country since this is the only way they could speak to the country. This is the only way they could testify. This meant that the Australian native title commission had to move the entire hearing to the desert. The case was decided in their favor and the commission noted that it was the most eloquent piece of evidence entered into an Australian court. We've been working on this project since September with our team. I was first alerted to it in an excellent essay called The Truth in Painting by Kirsten Anker, which you should read. What we hope to do and we're still some way from achieving it is to try to exhibit the canvas alongside a commissioned work that also speaks to the court case in order to complicate Australian evidentiary paradigms and the forms of cartographic representation that are associated with land tenure such as surveys and title deeds. Marina Taba-Soum is leading a project on the intersection of the Meghna and Padma Rivers in Chandipur in Bangladesh. As with most Deltaic rivers, the literal between the water and land is continually moving its location. As the riverbank moves forward, it literally swallows the settlements along its edge. They crash into the river and are carried away. As the riverbank retreats, the various households rebuild new dwellings in the newly available land. Now what is interesting to us is that there is an intergenerational understanding of land tenure that is relatively well defined under highly dynamic conditions. So for example, older generations will point to the middle of the river and they'll say that's how property over there, knowing full well that in the coming decades, their descendants will come and reoccupy the land. So the project is a kind of allegory for our times, which is how to coexist in a radically variable environmental condition. How do parcels of property superimpose on a Deltaic condition in intergenerational time? How they measured? How are disputes resolved and negotiated? How does inheritance function? What are the environmental impacts in terms of toxicity, et cetera? The final commission I want to mention examines Bali's complex system of rice irrigation, especially the encounter between the Green Revolution whereby Western corporations funded by international aid programs would supply the developing world with chemical fertilizers insecticides with the aim of dramatically improving crop yields and eradicating poverty. And the Balinese system of sub-bucks and religious temples that control water flow in the island through a ritualized system of a series of complex calendrical cycles. And the work was inspired by the writings of an anthropologist and Santa Fe alumni called Stephen Lansing, especially a book called Priests and Programmers. So as Adam Jasper writes, according to Lansing, the entire island functions like a giant computer that perfectly synchronizes the physical and cultural life of the island. Lansing saw the island as the perfect expression of a democratic, ecological and self-organizing system and he developed one of the very first environmental hydrological simulations in the world to prove it, which it did, apparently. Indeed, Lansing and his colleagues were instrumental in making the case that the Green Revolution would soon decimate Balinese rice irrigation and take Balinese society with it. In order to persuade the various national and international bodies that rice yields on the island could not be increased, he presented a simulation that explored various spatial temporal distributions of rice, water and pests. According to the simulation, the computer would eventually alight upon the most perfect, most efficient configuration. When it finally did that, the planet generated reproduced almost to the very last detail the already existing configuration of Balinese systems of irrigation, channels and rice fields. And you can make of that what you will. To mention, very quickly, two more projects. We're discussing a project on experimental social systems, especially eco-feminist agricultural cooperatives in the context of the Zapatistas of Chiapas, the Kurds of Rijava, Lebanon's Bakar Valley and Tunisia with Marwa Arsenios. And we're also discussing a project on Gaza and trying to understand and represent the spatial temporal conflation of scales at work in the Gaza blockade and protests. And especially to try to understand and explain the long-term consequences of maiming on the population inspired by the extraordinary work of Jasbir Pua and also led by Francesco Sebregondi. A quick conclusion. At its most fundamental level, climate change is the consequence of societies that have learned to apprehend the world in the most fatal and reductive of terms as nothing more than a resource to be exploited. The dominance of this perspective already leads many beings to exhaustion. Soon it will lead them all to extinction. What processes have brought the world to this point? How is it that a single perspective has come to dominate all others? After all, human history has furnished us with countless examples of alternative social orders of relationships between humans and other beings that evolved according to different beliefs and commitments, ones that refused to collapse life into a resource. What has brought us to this point, to the point of ecological collapse, is the consequence of a single perspective colonizing all others. This process is as yet incomplete and alternative perspectives courageously struggle to survive everywhere we turn. These ongoing struggles are a gift to those who are ready to receive them. They indicate the very last sites of experimentation with alternative social orders with perspectives on the relationships between humans and other beings that are not predicated in exploitation. Our task is to align ourselves with these sites and to imagine what is possible beyond the existing arrangement of things. Extractive relationships between beings are a learned pathology reinforced by the social, technical and mental ecologies we inhabit and that we continue to unthinkingly, unfeelingly reproduce without addressing the challenges posed by the state of affairs without identifying the fact that the present state of affairs is not an accident of history but rather a war waged on social, technical and mental lines. A war waged against those beings in order to condition them to accept their exploitation. A war in the words of the Invisible Committee on the front that exists within every one of us we will never understand climate change on its proper terms as the symptom of the eradication of alternative perspectives on what it means to live and to coexist with others. Architecture's role in all of this might turn out to be important but its latent potential to imagine, propose and rehearse alternative forms of coexistence must be disarticulated from the political economy it is currently installed within. In doing so it is offered the chance to align itself with existing sites of social struggle and social experimentation. In order to accomplish this task we have to ask questions that risk unsettling the existing order of relationships between architecture and these precious spaces of experiment. These encounters are not without risk. The very definition of what we mean when we say architecture will not emerge untroubled or unsettled as a consequence. Thank you. As I say before we start I'm going to take the initiative here from my two colleagues that Mark gave a very, very generous introduction. What you don't know is that in the formation of this in my mind I was often skyping with Mark with what I thought were really exciting discoveries about curation and exhibition making and you know he's so patient and all his students know this already. He was really generously having these discussions with me and I really feel like that for Mark it must have felt like Adrian had just discovered warm water that he never let on. So thank you. That's not at all. Super sweet. Just I would say like as a mid review you're doing all right. Yeah, no, super challenging program, project, talk and and full of so many risks and traps. I would say it's sort of hard to know where to intervene but maybe just to start because I just kept coming back to this when you were speaking like the the model of the joint which which was so important in your explanation of what we might mean by a different registration of architecture, a different registration of the detail was super super effective illustration because in a way in order to understand the different spatiality, the different sociality of that longhouse and of the family which was not the Victorian family. We had to understand the mode of vision that would occupy that space socially and politically and so we had to see a mode of seeing that we were not accustomed to seeing. And so the way that you get us there is by explaining that process through a set of diagrams that are themselves a mode of seeing a mode of seeing that we inherit and borrow from anthropologists who draw social relations and so the just to say that the way in which we have access to that seeing is through a complicated mediation of modes of seeing and ones that cycle through the very disciplines that we also want to unsettle and potentially decolonize. So I started to think about the exhibition as a mode of seeing and wondered how and I'm not saying you should have an answer to this because this is the project is to think through this not to answer this but I wondered how one would display that joint in an exhibition that was trying to decolonize our assumptions about seeing and not only decolonize our assumptions about seeing and what this let's say the social and political dimensions of seeing are in relation to family structures but also to decolonize the form of vision or to alter or critique the form of vision that is manifest within the exhibition or the exhibitionary complex. So how do you use the exhibition which has already trained us to see in a certain way to see something else to see a mode of seeing that we don't know how to see and so this seems like the incredibly interesting and challenging paradox of the project that you're up against and I'm sure the discussions you're having always circle back around this but I'm just wondering like to revert to like a very straightforward curatorial perspective have you thought how you do that how do you shift the registration of seeing within that space? Yeah, that's like a really key question and I think first of all it's important to say that I think it's a genuine problem. It's not like I have an answer because I think it's a difficult thing to do and like everything else I don't I guess what I presented tonight is a series of processes that we put in motion some of which will will manifest in the exhibition but many maybe will not and so my response like with everything else is to start to do a bit of research on actually just the elements of the exhibition so I didn't present this tonight at all. The first version of the presentation tonight was about 17,000 words so it would have been about three hours worth and then I realized I had to kind of viciously cut it down so there's a research project that we're doing which is called the image object which is really trying to think through the question of like the elements of an architectural exhibition. So for example and I guess one of the important things to register in what you're saying is that it's a kind of it's always an encounter with two different forms of seeing right the one that you're inculturated within and then the one you're trying to depict right so it's not like you start from nothing it's a kind of there's a kind of comparative moment yeah and the trick is how you make that figure ground oscillate yeah so you throw your own and that's I guess what I was trying to say about equivocation how do you throw your own mode of seeing into doubt such that you might register other modes of seeing right within an exhibition setting and I think that's really difficult if you rely on models drawings and images because it's true that if you walk into you know if you look at the plan of a longhouse yeah I mean no matter unless you like look at that really seriously and read around it you're not going to read that existential condition within it and the same is true for every architectural plan I mean you know and you know we're all you know really familiar with the history of architecture and so you can read a plan and you can look at the history of buildings the kind of type of building you understand if it's a school type you understand the kind of histories of education that means certain kinds of social organizations et cetera et cetera like that part's straightforward you know but you have but it's a kind of expert form of seeing yeah and the idea that somehow we can just put plans in exhibitions and that those things are legible to non-experts that somehow some kind of really you know a kind of form of collective subjectivities visible in the floor plan I mean that's also that's not true simply for most people I just wanted to come back to the seeing question I mean I was also struck by your use of anthropological documents in that presentation or your use of the image of the primitive hut you know not necessarily a little human but the question of how one both inhabits by necessity the western epistemology or disciplinary histories or even exhibition apparatuses and norms and yet simultaneously shakes them out of their certainty is the question and so in performing a lecture you know you can navigate that space provoking other questions proposing other questions producing juxtapositions and the question of how that could or whether that should translate into the exhibition strategy the seeing question I mean you know how you can actually produce a visual deconstruction in a way that mirrors or amplifies or potentially does something radically different to the type of interpretive deconstruction that one can perform in text or in voice it's a fundamental question it's a really big question but it's the fundamental question of the exhibition somehow and I think when you organize you walk into the arsenal and there's 400 models in a row lined up for a kilometer and you can't help but have banal aesthetic judgments especially after the 50th it's like I like the roof I don't like the roof you know it's like it's kind of hard to see beyond that and so what is an exhibition when in the absence of a kind of of a kind of architect to kind of perform a kind of explanation yeah so that's the kind of curatorial question and I think that's exactly what we're working on and I think that there is this very famous image of Le Corbusier pulling a cell of the unité out of the structural frame of the unité it kind of inaugurates a thousand cliches from then on you have all of these images of like hands doing things to architectural models even now it's like kind of trope and what does that speak to that simply speaks to the kind of necessity of the kind of a mediator or an interlocutor that exists between the project and its audience how do you do that in the case of an exhibition yeah is a really interesting question and we think and it's a hunch that actually if there's anything that speaks to that kind of existential condition it's probably cinema rather than architectural forms of representation or at least moving image in some way so there's something around the intersection between moving image and also let's say like also to move away from a reliance on not only on like conventional forms of representation but let's say on a kind of a kind of homogeneity of the kinds of materials that might one present that might one that one might want to present in an exhibition so it's to allow tensions to register between things like documents models moving image etc etc and maybe the last thing to say which is I think is also incredibly important is that actually that the context of the exhibition is also the space of the exhibition itself and somehow that's something that I think architectural exhibitions somehow always like large scale architectural exhibitions somehow imagine away and allowing that kind of that tension between the not only the institutional context but the physical context of the exhibition and the material to resonate differently might be one way of doing that but it's a really I think it's again it's a really difficult question I don't know I definitely don't have a kind of answer for all I know is there's a kind of sort of things that we're interested in and so yeah we don't have answers either but I you know I think it's a actually could I say one other thing like another really banal way of framing it is like this kind of it's like the problem of how come there's no people in like professional photography right and so actually like when when have we ever taken seriously the role of the figure right within the architectural image and even even if you look at everything from Russian avant-garde theater to post war cinema that relationship between the figure the prop and the set enters into some very very strange relationships where sometimes it's very difficult to work out like who is the agent yeah who is the motivating force is it the background is it the foreground is it the subject is it the prop and at different times they're also like you know Bresson's injunction to his actors which is like act like models you know and or something like last year Marion Bird where it's almost indistinguishable the statues on one hand and then the actors are as kind of immobile within the frame so there's something around that kind of that I really I think a complex set of relationships which barely started to look out within architecture around the figure the prop and the and the and the setting for architectural representation where I think there's just interesting research work to be done I don't know what will come of that this is not a question but I kept thinking when you when you ask the question how does inheritance function toward the end yeah towards your conclusion and and you you know trace various forms of filial inheritance and constitutive inequality that comes that's born out of those social norms on one hand and at the same time the forms of effective relationships that are also that also tend to attend them and it struck me that in different you know parts of the presentation of course you're also speaking to different different registers of inheritance into the institutional inheritance vis-a-vis questions of exhibition making disciplinary inheritance in terms of architecture yeah as a disciplinary framework that that also comes with these forms of exclusion and affiliation etc. and expectations but also potentially forms of sort of effect that could be put to work otherwise and considering if there's not also a type of lesson coming out of your very beautiful reading of the Longhouse and the sort of comparative method of the Longhouse that allows us to equally arrange the Victorian room as it does to put pressure on the sort of gaze of the anthropologist I'm wondering if each of these registers and many others at play and I think that's in a way to respond because your reading does this beautiful produces this beautiful entanglement of all the different dimensions of the problem of putting on the Trianale much like the reading of the mode of life of the form of life dissolves into so many components in order to be legible but these were three that I sort of tried to draw out so without trying to produce a sort of epistemic violence really into institutional disciplinary and the sort of filial in terms of intergenerational I'm wondering if if there isn't some way of performing something similar vis-a-vis the discipline vis-a-vis and I don't know what that would look like but again it's also really taken by the dismantling of notions of shelter and on the one hand by a political replacing the semiotic and you know we sort of know where where that goes it also seems that shelter is one of these terms that that already marks us as having Western epistemology obviously but it also for many of us trained within architecture come to this like discomfort and so the discomfort that we experience thinking we're going to talk about shelter and we're not uncomfortable because we know that these terms arise in the context of a certain 19th century experience of the other but it is also sort of partially why it makes us uncomfortable because the embrace of these terms I mean I'm not saying you're embracing them you're deconstructing them but the embrace of these terms also often channels archaisms that are forms of racism or forms of exoticization or forms and so I think there's a way in which the slight discomfort that maybe this is just biographical having worked on Rodofsky and having I think I work on vernacular architecture not modernism but I think there's sort of something about that discomfort like oh where's he going is he heading towards their romantic no oh he's not okay but so why why these terms coming with yeah like how are they interrupting our certainties or how are they destabilizing the sort of terms when we think you know we've got past I don't know we still have to deal with this it's still haunting something like the possibility of an exhibition that tries to take into account of residual forms of paternalism vis-a-vis Africa Asia I mean so I'm just wondering if there's something about the the I don't know that way of making people uncomfortable that is not productive do you know what I mean yeah yeah I mean I think I think I mean I'd be more uncomfortable if you were talking about like rotation and subtraction and that you know it's yeah the next the next ones are like solid and void yeah yeah look I mean also I think the first thing and maybe to go back again to just to the previous question for a second is that I think it's also important that like an exhibition doesn't explain things too much you know because in Goddard Fredo and I talk about this all the time it's like sometimes like we're so like deeply rooted in the alignment that we think like explaining things like fixes things or that changes things I think it's you know you can kill things by explaining them too much and actually I guess that's what's interesting about the concept of rights of future generations to me it's that you know ultimately it does something where the effective register and the logical register don't actually align very often or if they align or when they misalign that misalignment is kind of productive and I think probably the same thing is true for thinking about the idea of how issues of inheritance or for example might function or the question of the generation might function from a disciplinary perspective I think like on one hand the kind of deconstruction of the concept of shelter is because it's really a way of pre-formatting to go back to Mark's first question vision so when we see something you know what do we what do we see when we see it and it's kind of pre-formatting that makes us just see the heart repeat everywhere and so then in that sense also simply just draws our attention I think away from other kinds of things that might be really interesting that might not look like shelters but might qualify for thinking architecturally because of other kinds of criteria because societies intervene in the world in certain kinds of ways they manipulate their environments spatially in certain kinds of ways and they organize themselves socially around those manipulations so that would kind of be maybe let's say a very broad definition so on one hand shelter just stops us looking at those kinds of things and I think those kinds of things might be really interesting to look at and then of course there's a kind of within the very idea of genealogy itself it's a really rich rich themes for example another part of the lecture which I completely stripped out was a whole bunch of research we're doing on the visualization of family trees which is kind of interesting it's not immediately obvious that you would use an arborescent tree diagram to represent kinship how did that come to why was it that the kind of tree became the main figure to explain things like kinship and of course it's not just kinship but it plays an incredibly important role in the way we start to think about knowledge the way we start to think about taxonomy in fact not just the organization of knowledge but also in some way the beginning of the idea of the museum and therefore of exhibition making in certain kinds of ways so in fact the genealogical theme is somehow also at the heart of the curatorial project from its inception yeah I'm not sure what else to say about that in terms of in terms of architecture in a disciplinary sense but maybe Mark you're you look like you're going to say something I don't know trying to save me we should ask the audience to but just I can't also you know so many things I can't let go of but the but the FLN the burning of the archive in order to protect it from the FLN and so you describe this as a precondition the destruction of destruction and so all of the discussion about epistemology organization of knowledge cataloging it's hard not to see those archives as representative of that as well and so when the lecture starts the project starts within the ashes of the archive I start to wonder what that's doing for you conceptually programmatically and representationally because at one level we understand let's say the willful destruction of these places of information concentration as an act of violence but we also understand this as an analogy to other forms of willful destruction that you have led us through the lecture and so there's some kind of correlation between the archive and I don't know I mean it's a loose association of environmental damage etc but it's also hard not to think of that protective membrane that holds together the archive as a kind of shelter and so I'm just trying to figure out what does that mean to ground the dismantling of structure on a form of violence enacted against the structure I know it's a complicated set of relationships but I think it actually makes an incredible amount of sense there's two answers to it one is very practical this is a research based exhibition and so there are just really practical challenges around doing research the things that you can't take for granted there's three city blocks worth of archives above us, below us above us so one of the largest collections of architectural material in the world and for your students if you want to send them to do research on the history of campus architecture there's literally hundreds of things that you can refer them to those same kinds of records are simply consistent in certain parts of the world so that just makes architectural education really challenging so for example as part of doing the research for Sharjo and I didn't mention this but we're doing three streams of research on the city of Sharjo itself one is on housing, one is on education one is on the environment and we have students who are kind of breaking into buildings and taking photos of fire escape plans and translating them just because we need the plan of a school building and it's just not available so can you imagine how laborious that is so that's the kind of practical aspect of it the second aspect I think which is more conceptually important is that also what we mean by the archive is clearly not just libraries it's clearly not just manuscripts and documents and in fact what is so fascinating about the question of environmental destruction we know that an archive might be the level of CO2 trapped in an air bubble in an ice core and that might tell you something about the genocide of South America in the 16th century so that's actually the stratigraphy of the earth is continually registering violence in different kinds of ways so it's not that that's a particularly classical portrait of what is an archive today I just have one I don't really have a well formulated question here but I really like the dedication the two unknown contemporaries with which you open the lecture and I very fascinated by the the futurity that is embedded certainly in the title in terms of the rights of future generations and I just let me you're the first question and I really appreciated the recognition that rights discourse and human rights discourse always already implies a type of future but it's not necessarily a knowable future and so far as we also know that the types of rights like the types of categories of humans that are included in human rights have changed including the rights of women and the rights of you know that the so this is type of unknowability about that future that refuses any possibility to plan that future and yet at the same time demands that we take responsibility for that and it keeps reminding me of course that on the one hand there's the imperative to script you know hope or futurity in the sense of opening up new possibilities whether or not they remain sort of indebted to existing or prior institutional structures like the United Nations or the Biennale architecture is a discipline but on the other hand just I don't know how to connect this but you know architecture of course architects are also always an already custodians of the future that's what architects do they build futures they imagine better futures they script possible futures also though with different degrees of fidelity to the present in the terms of present norms present institutional structures present social expectations and so you know there's then different models of futurity some of which follow a sort of future logical in the sense of you know dreaming something different but embedded within the norms of the present others are about perpetuating the present others are a radical type of discontinuity etc etc so trying to think about you know what lessons there might be from architects and the sort of futurity of architecture and the type of hope that motivates a lot of work in the discipline yeah to think otherwise to produce otherwise to imagine something else I'm wondering whether there's something about the different forms of futurity again if we hold back the futurology of Mikhail and these sort of characters and think with other moments in the field that could help us think about that that yeah the relation of the rights questions I know this is a really clumsy connection but it seems like you know architects have a type of creative intelligence in the future that institutions like the UN may not yet you know I'm not saying what is not creative that's not my point no no I think you're right and what you're saying which is that the future like futurity takes place in different keys yeah and that's incredibly important to be sensitive to those keys so for example one of the things that I think is very important within the work on rights of future generations is that it's not just the idea of rights and generations that become mobilized and open up to different perspectives but that the idea of the future itself becomes open to different kinds of perspectives and there's different versions of like what those perspectives might be so for example Matthias Fritz who I quoted in his book comes at it through Levinus and Derrida and will say well you know man is a kind of being unto life and death and therefore because we are we outlive others and people outlive us therefore that our there is no such thing as the present or that the present is always being claimed by other forms of temporality you know by the others around us and so in fact the present is never present to itself and so he says well actually that renders less anomalous let's say a way of thinking future generations so that could be like let's say one version of futurity the other versions of futurity which I think are also really important come to us from indigenous studies as well so for example the idea of reincarnation and so you know this triangle is going to have projects on reincarnation there's going to be projects which I think is a really fascinating thing why because what does reincarnation do it means that there is a substitutability in a kind of generational sequence that someone can return as it were from the past into the present and that does really interesting things to social groups for example it breaks the filial line because suddenly you might be a relative to someone else or yeah well normally within humans but potentially within with other species as well so there is a so the question of substitutability becomes important but also the role of the dead and practices around caring for the dead so things like burial practices cremation exhumation are also going to figure within the triangle because I think they also speak to different modes of futurity different ways of let's say tending toward a future what implications those kinds of things have for architecture I think is a really open question I don't know but I think you're right to point out to something that's actually really fundamental about architecture which I think is one of its real powers is that it's propositional you know and that's where I think it's you know I'm really much more interesting than anthropology for example because you know anthropologists and anthropology have spent you know decades agonizing of the location of the anthropologists within the ethnographic context and the role of observations and the kind of distortion of the field that's brought about by the role of you know by ethnographic practice etc you know architects for better or worse that's not always for better have are always thinking through intervention yeah I think and that's kind of something that's you know I fundamentally at the kind of core of the way that we see the world and I think that's I think there's a kind of power with that no it's like it's not like knowledge is out there and then you go and you kind of like scoop up that knowledge to disturb something in the world and then you study how it responds and then you learn something from that disturbance I think it's a kind of different attitude toward knowledge production I was fascinated by this idea of moving from geographies to problematic conditions and and also with the possibility of thinking of the articulation of the existence of contemporary with the non-contemporary and through your presentation there's a series of moments in which you are addressing actually this shift like you were moving for instance from this way of dealing with next generations to the encounter of different generations intergenerationality and you were also thinking of the at one point that kind of human time would encounter the time of the environment or other actors and that was supposed to in many moments to a notion of colonialism that was very much linear in terms of time and that was very much about expansion and about and that was part of the making of all the characterization of the other as resource and following on this because that is a very sophisticated way of moving from a modern time to a let's say a time of politics or a time of where the inquiry into the modes of existence is relevant but are very much also kind of insistent of this kind of linear time so I wonder what's the way that you can decolonize the actual notion of time that is sort of played by triennials and the whole kind of even details of that as you mentioned at the beginning of your talk of PR agencies the rhetorics of that all those things that are very much constituting what an exhibition like a triennial is that's a really good question this is a really good midterm create so let me try to think through that really seriously so I think the first thing is that by defining something in terms of dimensions what I don't want to fall into the trap of is kind of privileging the local because I think this is also a mistake and actually there is something around so for example we're doing a project on the Sahel and actually part of that is working with someone who's doing remote sensing so that very de-territorialized relationship to a condition is something that's very common to architects and you're kind of like a drone pilot sitting somewhere in Virginia piloting any camera if you're a cat operator in an architectural office and you're staring at a plan and in CAD for maybe a year like you have an intensity of relationship to that now I don't want to disqualify that as like an inauthentic relationship because you haven't been there or something I think there's something in that kind of synthetic de-territorialized relationship to a site that is actually really important that we shouldn't somehow discount and so talking about conditions actually is a way of allowing that conflation of those different intensities that make something resonate then in terms of like thinking about the kind of contemporary and non-contemporary presence I think there is if your ancestors are around you and the forest like what does contemporary mean so if we want to allow other modes of existence to register then we have to throw the question of contemporaneity into doubt because for many societies your ancestors are here your ancestors might be a forest your ancestors might be indistinguishable from the landscape that's one thing the third part of the question which is unlike the time of the triangle I think is really challenging the only way I know how to respond to it is this is that out of everything I've presented tonight it's just a kind of setting into motion of a series of processes and we use the triangle as a kind of a pretext to set those things into motion those things, some of those things will fall into the triangle others will escape some will use the triangle as a way of kind of amplifying them of creating like a community of inquiry that will have discussions that might continue beyond the life of the triangle of maybe trying to at least formulate some problems in the field that we think are important whether it's to do with exhibition making or the absence of mediators in front of an architectural project etc etc etc but then in terms of like what is the legacy and so legacy is a bad way of framing time but I think there's a richer there's a richer dimension to your project a richer dimension to your question which I'm not really capturing in the idea of legacy but let's say if we frame it at least in the terms of legacy one thing I didn't talk about tonight was you know there's a figure who I've been writing about for since well almost 2012 or 2010 which is Le Monde de Arping who was this a Sudanese diplomat who represented the G77 at the 2009 Copenhagen climate conference and I think is one of the most important political interventions of our time basically scuttled Obama's deal this kind of G8 deal agreeing on a 2 degree temperature increase I've been working with Le Monde since July on something called a working group so the working group's aim is to draft a charter on rights of future generations which will be a series of working sessions at the conclusion of the working sessions there will be a summit in the opening week of the Triennial and the charter will be produced and the idea there is to say to find a way of taking these various sites of social struggle that are captured within the exhibition and to create a kind of institutional vehicle that in a way fulfills the potential of rights of future generations which is to become a kind of populist concept in some ways and so the idea is that the working group in a sense is a kind of vehicle to produce that the concept comes from international humanitarian law how do we make it return to the space of international humanitarian law in a really serious way so I see that as like one of the ways in which the time of the Triennial outlives the time of the exhibition itself but yeah there's like an entire lecture on public relations companies just the kind of the structures of institutional power and the kind of temporality of the various institutions involved in exhibition making which if you don't deconstruct and take seriously I think they really end up over coding over determining so much of what you do in an exhibition even just take a simple example even just the circulation of publications Andrea who's editing the books for us he was saying that if you want to move a journal from South Africa to Nigeria in a process through Europe this is still a colonial circuit let alone how you start thinking about how those things might take place how they might register or take on have a kind of legacy outside of those circuits of institutional power and you know we're sitting in the center of institutional power I sit in the center of institutional power in London so the question is like on one hand how do you like commit treason against your own institution right because you know that every single time you enter into discussion you have an asymmetry of control over you have a power to make things circulate to represent things in ways that your interlocutors cannot yeah and there's a kind of fundamental ethical question around how we work from New York or from London in these kinds of contexts that's exactly my question pretty much following up also on last night's provocation by Nanya Roy in planning you who are our senior scholars and leaders in the fields how do you decide how much to rock the boat or to break the boat and which parts of the boat do you rock versus break in what I understand in the way we do things and the things that we do so for architects it's exhibitions perhaps for us it's peer reviewed articles or circulations of zoning technologies or other things but we put those into question yet you call the archives there's a lack of archives a lack of archives and you are one of the leaders in showing us how me at least as a planner looks to you to see other forms of evidence as archive buildings, traces so many other things but yet we still understand this as a lack because it is a lack and then secondly thinking about education and your role as an educator isn't it I've never been to an architectural exhibition in my life complete night of day but don't we pretty well know how people learn things and how their views how their ways of seeing are shaken up that's by doing by participating or by making at the same time and so why is it always about seeing something in an exhibition why is that the way that it's talked about but I think an exhibition doesn't have to mean seeing things and there is all kinds of other forms of engagement or participation that an exhibition might structure from everything from public program to performance to workshops I think it doesn't need to mean looking at pictures or looking at things on the wall and to answer your first question how do you decide where to apply pressure I think it's really ultimately just a question of how much time you have you know you just make a pragmatic decision on the things that you can push and how far you can push them and then you stop when you run out of time I think also just it's really practical Append to Adrian's answer I don't think we all know what seeing and learning is I don't think we can assume that this has been coded probably the space of the exhibition of properly managed conceived and curated puts all of that into doubt so that that can be rethought and and repoliticized and so finding institutions that through which that can happen is clearly an important task or also finding ways in which you can put pressure on the institution in which you were attempting to do that is also an important task for example the great undone project on architecture exhibitions is just to look at the political economy of the Venice Biennale non-architects in the audience you may not be aware of this but ultimately it's an incredibly exploitative system and at the bottom of that system is artists and architects and actually just to unpack the political economy of the Venice Biennale would be I think a really incredible project and yet most of the times that we talk about exhibitions we slip into talking about content because the kind of institutional power and structure is somehow invisible so how you make those things how you render those things visible I think is a really important question we also kind of assume that sorry how we see and learn is in any way stable and it reminds me this is a sort of anecdote from something we're reading in class yesterday a beautiful text by Guillain Prakash who's called Museum Matters and there's a moment in his text where he turns to this sort of anecdote from an Indian anthropological museum in India do you know this text and he had been following the natives around with the calipers to try and measure them in his very British colonial way when he encounters a group of indigenous people laughing at the representation by the west revealing the apparatus of the western institution to him and so there are these moments that even something as stable as a western sort of diorama like comes to seem radically different not only in the way it seems different to us now as a type of archaism that we enjoy and laugh at but even in the moment of presentation supposedly as a functional type of exhibition apparatus and so the shifts in perspective according to who's encountering it and how they're seeing it can dismantle the very assumption of what they're learning so they were supposed to be learning about how they as colonial subjects are what they're learning about is the British and so I think there are we don't know how things are seen and by whom hi how are you I really appreciated your presentation and your attention to the colonial practice a central organizing principle for your curatorial strategy and actually way in which a decolonial practice leads to a much more expanded understanding of curatorial practice and I just wondered whether you could share with us a little bit more about the process of identifying curators and the kinds of projects that you want to throw resources at yeah that's such a good question and actually so the question of like how you take resources from centers of institutional power and divert them in aware of the kinds of always asymmetries of power that you produce whenever you're working through these kinds of structures is incredibly important I think there's no easy answer for it and I think we really struggle because first of all um it's it's really astonishing the degree to which the ways the way the degree to which value production in architecture is structured through these histories yeah and to try to work outside of them even to try to work outside of um the structures of value production journals magazines you know etc etc etc um and to then engage with other kinds of contexts is I mean I can't I can't tell you how difficult we've found it yeah um so I mean there's obvious things you know you kind of you travel you speak to as many people as possible um you try to be in the in your approach you depend on a lot of informants in different places and it's just really work yeah it's time and work I think one other one other way around it is to also if architecture yeah which is a kind of let's say the profession and the discipline of architecture if it's evolution in the form that we know it um you can almost draw a line from the renaissance to the present right in terms of in terms of its discipline reformation um maybe one of the lessons from some of the work that I've been trying to do is that actually it's not really important that the people that are in the exhibition are architects i.e. exist within that discipline reformation yeah so for example it might be an anthropologist it might be a photographer it might be an anthropologist it might be etc etc etc in fact if what they're doing and if the conditions that they're working in are somehow architectural and resonate within the context of the of the exhibition then it's an architectural project so for example I don't feel a burden of having to represent the profession I also don't feel a burden of trying to be representative as well because even the idea of a survey is already to fall back into that gaze that is somehow that kind of like 19th century version of pavilions in Venice or whatever the case may be um but it's a really difficult question and we'll make a small inroad into it in Sharjah I hope but that's probably the most we can expect so thank you thank you Adrian and thank you all for coming out