ADS8: Terraqueous Sojourners

The Mediterranean Basin can be read as a composite ‘political and ecological body’, while also being seen as a spatial and temporal continuum, as opposed to ‘a gap’, and a point of convergence of three continents – Africa, Asia, and Europe – comprising a sum of its disparate, fragmented, and contradictory parts. To echo Adrian Lahoud, the basin can be viewed as ‘a site of endless epistemological provocations'. [1]

While the Basin acts as a critical testing site for contemporary forms of sovereignty, border practices, militarisation, seafaring, territorial transformations, surveillance technologies, and forms of extraction of data and goods, it simultaneously offers a lens that allows us to read the contours of the wider dynamics of the so-called ‘double internality’. [2] This ecological body, therefore, becomes a contingent locus in which nature and capital – the latter aptly described by Jason W. Moore as a mosaic of relations – work through each other and operate along spectrums of separation and relation [3].

In this third instalment of ADS8, the studio will journey with and through the Mediterranean Basin to explore the myriad protocols that reveal how relations, separations, and tensions continue to shape the Mediterranean imaginary. In view of the ever-intensifying climate crisis, which is turning the Mediterranean Basin into one of the world’s climatic ‘hot spots’, further exacerbating the conditions of its already deeply fractured worlds, ADS8 will (re)envisage the Basin as a site for rehearsal; a site where various potential futurities will compete and collide. Equally, our investigations will seek to chart the potential linkages that (re)connect the Basin with its multiple elsewhere(s), spanning lands and waters across the Atlantic Archipelago, Sahara Desert, Southern and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. Students are invited to think through, conceive of, and rehearse these potential futurities through the framework of the Mediterranean Basin, while firmly grounding their visions in practices and models of repair, abolition, and justice.

ADS8 acknowledges the existing, wide-ranging historic body of knowledge related to the Mediterranean Basin. While we will critically draw upon and reflect on the Basin as an epistemic archive/depository, we do not seek to privilege, centralise, or reify the Mediterranean, but rather to use it as a lens through which we can engage with various issues that are pertinent to the rich nexus of liquid and terrestrial territories near and far, of which the Basin forms a part. In light of this, ADS8 welcomes projects situated in the Mediterranean, its multiple elsewhere(s), and beyond.

Building on an analytical framework that has critically examined remnants of Empire, in 2024/25 ADS8 will consider three strategic nodes that allow us to read the Basin as an interconnected system of environmental, geopolitical, and social fractures, which we call Mediterranean Itineraries. Students will be challenged to position their projects within one of critical axes on this Itinerary, prompting them to interrogate the mechanisms driving the contemporary production of space and shaping this imaginary along:

1. Spectres of Flow

The Mediterranean’s deep-seated maritime corridors, which are integral to its oceanic space, serve as a vital artery and conduit for global capital flows, rendering visible the commodification of its aqueous milieus. This plethora of intertwined networks of both submerged and visible infrastructures – from inland freight systems and dry docks to industrial zones – operate as a hub for automated logistics, trade, and the extraction of goods and data. This node interrogates the modus operandi of these circulation patterns and reticulated networks, together with their spatial-temporal paradigms and mechanisms, actors, and implications. It will investigate how infrastructure spaces and logistics underpin the transformation of watery bodies and their terrestrial limbs along with the hidden worlds of globalisation. Central questions include: What are the forces at play within this nexus of automation, labour conditions, supply chains, and global capitalism? And how do they manifest spatially across land and sea? Our investigations will delve into introducing subversive forms of infrastructures/counter-infrastructures that have the potential to disturb, unsettle, and destabilise this nexus, as well as the forces that operate within it.

2. Hydro-Climatic Rifts

The Basin has historically performed a significant role as a climate regulator. Yet, the accelerating impacts of climate change, ranging from increasing aridity, water scarcity, recurrent droughts, and impending desertification – all of which are intensified by technocratic, capitalist pursuits, mining, and industrialisation – have fractured its ecosystems. Consequently, these hydro-climatic shifts have tectonically impacted entire bio- and eco–regions, destabilizing and altering the fragile balance between different forms of life and other–than–human cohabitation. With its projected annual mean temperature expected to increase between 3.5–5.5℃ by the end of this century, far surpassing the global average, the Basin will become an important site for rehearsing some of the most extreme scenarios of the future. Given such alarming predictions, this node will focus on documenting hydro-climatic shifts using available data clouds – bathymetry, hydrology/phenology, and scanning technologies – while also seeking alternative politics of inhabiting the Earth, drawing on and learning from diverse practices of ecological repair and multi–special collaboration.

3. The Black Mediterranean

The genealogies that organise the world along cartographies of struggle, marked by the spectre of movement at different speeds, lay bare the legal geopolitics governing oceanic spaces. Far from being mere lines that exist to undo worlds, borders separate bodies. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, the ultimate manifestation of sovereignty largely resides in the power and capacity to constrict flows of certain bodies (human and other–than–human forms of life), while allowing other forms (goods, data) to freely circulate [4]. In the light of this, the Basin acts as a multilayered and interscalar filtration mechanism that has a hand in exacerbating social hierarchies, calling into question the protocols – both spatial and legal – that produce and uphold border regimes, their determinants, and the cosmologies that perpetually remake and unmake worlds. Both the deadliest and the most congested border crossing in the world, the Basin presents itself as a testing ground for emerging issues of climate refugeehood, post-post-colonial migrant trajectories, intensified media and surveillance landscapes, and legal and territorial fluidity.

In The Black Atlantic (1993), Paul Gilroy asks how the historical and cultural exchanges across the Atlantic have shaped Black identities. If we look to the Mediterranean as today’s most significant site of diasporic mass dispersion, in this node we also ask how contemporary cultural exchanges across its shores shape Othered identities? And which dynamics do they engender and/or solidify, reconfiguring power relations, infrastructural trajectories, and ways of in- and cohabiting space, birthing new sites of hospitality and hostility? As Katherine McKittrick notes, the ‘cartographic rules’ that unevenly orchestrate and shape the patterns of life are alterable [5)]. In this node, the Black Mediterranean acts a rubric through which to explore possible practices of worlding through speculative devices/infrastructures/architectures/technologies that disrupt these legal and spatial protocols, while gesturing toward new terrains of existence. Students are encouraged to think with and apply ‘mobility justice’ – as it not only pertains to crises of migration, but also to urbanisation and climate – to interrogate and reformulate the ways in which regimes of mobility might manifest in the built environment. [6]

Building on the methodical foundations of the past two years, ADS8 operates as a migratory studio, navigating various critical nodes and scales of inquiry. The studio opens with a range of analytical tools encompassing remote sensing, system mapping, cartography, and narrative construction – aural, visual, written and material – which, in combination with theory, exposes students to bodies of knowledge that will guide them in formulating the theoretical and conceptual groundings to anchor their projects. Their research, conceptualisation, and experimentations will be collated in an Atlas of Itineraries, which will act as a companion throughout the follwoing terms. In tandem with regular studio teaching, ADS8 will host a series of workshops, lectures and seminars with practitioners, scholars, activists, and artists to expand the theoretical, methodological, and conceptual breadth of our inquiries.

In Term 2, we embark on an itinerary that physically locates us along strategic nodes that constellate relations, contradictions, transitions, continuities, and ruptures across lands, waters, and bodies. On–site observations, coupled with technological mediation, fabrication and making, will serve as our stomping ground for curating multiscalar spatial design strategies across territorial, urban, and architectural scales, and embedded within the geopolitical and ecological complexities and realities of chosen locale(s).

ADS8 has a deep-seated tradition of interdisciplinary collaboration with an array of individuals and organisations at the productive end of critical inquiry and architecture. In 2024/25, ADS8 will partner with multi-disciplinary designer Miriam Hillawi Abraham to speculate on futurity, living materials, innovative technologies, and the mythical histories held within material knowledge and geographies. Previous partners have included The Funambulist, Forensic Architecture, Jornal Mapa, Nzinga B. Mboup (Collectif Worofila), and Calvin Po (Dark Matter Labs), among others. In 2022/23, a partnership with Hangar – Center for Artistic Investigations culminated in a residency held in Lisbon; and in 2023/24 we collaborated with Louisiana-based activist groups, Break Free From Plastic and The Descendants Project, employing investigative forensics and filmmaking as critical tools of inquiry.

Notes

[1] Adrian Lahoud, The Mediterranean, A New Imaginary, in New Geographies 5: The Mediterranean, ed. Antonio Petrov (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 83.

[2&3] Jason W. Moore, Capitalism in the web of life: ecology and the accumulation of capital (London: Verso, 2015), intro., Apple Books.

[4] Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics. Duke University Press, 2019.
[5] Katherine McKrittick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, (Minneapolis / London: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

[6] Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in An Age of Extremes. Verso, 2018.

Margarida Waco (Cabinda/Denmark) is an architect and writer. Currently, a PhD Candidate at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at ETH Zürich, and an editorial advisor to The Funambulist, where she previously led the strategic outreach, Waco has practised across offices in Copenhagen, Paris, and Stockholm, working across architectural and urban design, acquisition and creative business development. Her works have been presented and published internationally, including at the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale, Architekturmuseum der TUM, Palais de Tokyo, Nyansapo Afrofeminist Festival, Malmö Art Museum, Afterall, Archive of Forgetfulness, Ellipses Journal of Creative Research, among others, and she has co-authored Informal Horizons (2019), and co-edited Pan-Africanism (2020) and Homeplace - A Love Letter (2023). She is the recipient of the JAE 24/25 Fellowship.

Dr Mirna Pedalo is a London-based architectural practitioner, researcher and scholar interested in the intersection of architecture, urban development, and finance in post-conflict societies, particularly in the Western Balkans. Trained as an architect, Mirna holds MAs in Architecture and Visual Cultures from the University of Westminster, and a PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. In 2019, Mirna was a recipient of the RIBA President’s Award for Research in the Cities and Community category, and is one of the founding members of DocomomoBH. She works as an Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art, University of Westminster and Oxford Brookes University.

Abiba Coulibaly is a film curator with a background in critical geography. Currently, she programmes for Film Africa, Open City Documentary Festival and Magnum Photos Film Festival which she also founded. Her projects Brixton Community Cinema and Atlas Cinema are experiments in what democratising access to cinema - as both space and medium - could look like. Her film practice maintains a consistent engagement with questions of spatial and civic equity as exemplified by her recent London Festival of Architecture commission to design, build and programme an outdoor cinema in Brixton, Views on the Atlantic. Abiba was a participant in the 4th cohort of New Architecture Writers and holds an MA in Urban History and Culture from the University of London Institute in Paris.

with

Miriam Hillawi Abraham is a multi-disciplinary designer from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. With a background in Architecture, she works with digital media and spatial design to interrogate themes of equitable futurism and intersectionality. She holds an MFA in Interaction Design from the California College of the Arts and a BArch in Architecture from the Glasgow School of Art. She has worked as the game-code instructor at Bay Area Video Coalition’s youth program for over three years and is now a Mellon researcher for the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s Digital Now multidisciplinary project. Abraham's work has been featured in the 18th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia as part of the Special Project “Guests from the Future”, as well the "/imagine: A Journey into The New Virtual" exhibition at the MAK Museum of Applied Arts, the 2nd Sharjah Architecture Triennial and the 14th Shanghai Biennale, “Cosmos Cinema.”