Take Back the Land Event Series

Take Back the Land seeks to broaden the understanding of 'land' across spatial and temporal scales, both below and above ground, including its social and spiritual dimensions. The series will consist of two events per term, organised in stages to maximise the participation of students and staff across the School, culminating in a two-day international symposium on Take Back the Land in Term 3.

Land is central to many struggles in the world today: from urban struggles for housing or against gentrification, to decolonisation struggles, struggles against extractivism and plantation monoculture, to struggles for the return of ancestral First Nation territories against settler colonies. The Take Back the Land Event Series will ask why this is so, what is at stake for those engaged in these processes, and what role architecture can play in these struggles.

To reflect on the role of architecture within struggles for taking back the land has been a longstanding concern across most programmes and units of study at the RCA. The event series builds on the School of Architecture Elective Unit Take Back the Land, and runs in parallel with the preparation of the edited volume TBtL with Goldsmiths Press – that collects contributions from staff members from all across the School of Architecture. The Take Back the Land Event Series takes Annual Research Programme as an opportunity for fostering a one-year-long collective discussion across the School of Architecture, opening lines of discussion across programmes and levels of study, bringing together different staff and student cohorts, and building up a collective contribution towards an international symposium.

In Term 1, we will host two preparatory workshops across the School of Architecture: the first will be a Collective Bibliography on Take Back the Land. This will be a session open to all students and staff, where we will compile and discuss, together, a bibliography for Take Back the Land including texts, films, and music. Each participant will be asked to bring and present between three to five references. We aim to run this as a day-long collective session, where staff and students can drop-in and out. The bibliography document will be edited live and streamed online. The second workshop will produce a Collective Vocabulary on Take Back the Land, focusing on key concepts being used by movements engaged in taking back the land struggles from all across the world. Each participant will be asked to bring and present one concept or to think how Take Back the Land translates into their language as a rallying call for action.

In Term 2 we will go in-depth into the two key concepts that structure this series. The third workshop of the series, titled What do we mean by ‘land’?, looks at the importance of land, across ecological and anti-colonial struggles, and in relation to neighbouring terms such as territory, terrain or earth. The following workshop, titled What do we mean by ‘taking back’? looks at a core debate around questions of land, namely, the difference between claims for the control of land founded upon concepts of property, birth rights or ownership, and forms of control over land towards ambitions of care, stewardship and protecting the rights of past and future generations. These sessions will both be organised as an intervention of two guest speakers: architect Cruz Garcia and philosopher Maïa Hawad. While speakers will be joining us online, we will gather together.

Term 3 consists of a three-day international symposium. This will include presentations from invited keynote speakers; from staff contributing to the Take Back the Land book, and from School of Architecture students and staff selected via an Open Call for papers. We will also present the TBL Bibliography and Collective Vocabulary on Take Back the Land developed during Term 1.

Convened by Dubravka Sekulic, Godofredo Enes Pereira and Shehrazade Mahassini.

Term 1

Two preparatory workshops invite the School oof Architecture to think, discuss and compile a collective bibliography and vocabulary for the Take Back the Land event series.

Collective bibliography workshop

10 October 2024, 10am – 5pm
Senior Common Room

School of Architecture collective bibliography

Collective vocabulary workshop

24 October 2024, 10am – 5.30pm
Senior Common Room

School of Architecture Collective Vocabulary

Term 2

What do we mean by ‘Land’? With Maïa Tellit Hawad

Mending Land – Tuareg Narratives of the Territory

13 March 2025, 5–7pm
Senior Common Room and online

The mid-20th century ushered the Central Sahara into the new atomic era. "Nuclear tests in the Ahaggar Desert (Algeria) and uranium mining in the heart of the Aïr (Niger) left a lasting inscription on Saharan bodies and landscapes, shaped by the forces of global energy markets and the military-industrial complex.To evoke the present situation and the enclosed horizons it imposes, Tuareg discourses mobilize images of rupture, of a torn weave or a severed cloth. What notions of land underlie these vocabularies of disaster? What modes of spatiality and relation do they bring to the fore? What histories of the territory are inscribed into the very words themselves?

Following the planes of experiences drawn by these narratives, this lecture proposes to rethink and unsettle the cartographies of extractivism from the perspective of indigenous languages and memories. From the imaginaries of disaster, counter-fields emerge: concepts and gestures of ambush, camouflage, and the repair of a wounded land.

Maïa Tellit Hawad is a researcher and PhD candidate at Yale University (French and Francophone Studies). Her work focuses on nomadic becomings in contemporary Tuareg society and the intersection of geography, coloniality, and race in the current governance of the Central Sahara.

What do we mean by ‘Taking Back’? With WAI Think Tank 

Ema is for Emancipation and other planetary loudreadings

27 March 2025, 5–7pm
Upper Gulbenkian A + Online, register via EventBrite.

Exploring forms of action to blur the supposed separation between critical forms of architectural theory and practice, WAI Think Tank discusses relationships, futures, solidarities, Loudreading, LandBack, Rematriation and the difference between principled positions and cowardice as architectural theory. 

WAI Architecture Think Tank is a planetary studio practicing by questioning the political, historical, and material legacy and imperatives of architecture and urbanism through a panoramic and critical approach. Founded in Brussels during the financial crisis of 2008 by Puerto Rican architect, artist, curator, educator, author and theorist Cruz Garcia and French architect, artist, curator, educator, author and poet, Nathalie Frankowski, WAI is one of their several platforms of public engagement that include Beijing-based anti-profit art space Intelligentsia Gallery, and the free and alternative education platform and trade-school Loudreaders.

Term 3

3-day Symposium: take back the land

14,15 and 16 May 2025
Location and programme to be announced soon

The Take Back the Land event series is a year-long collaborative research programme across the SoA, culminating in a three-day international symposium on Take Back the Land in Term 3. Land is central to many struggles in the world today: from urban struggles for housing or against gentrification, to decolonisation struggles, struggles against extractivism and plantation monoculture, to struggles for the return of ancestral First Nation territories against settler colonies. The Take Back the Land Event Series asks why this is so, what is at stake for those engaged in these processes, and what role architecture can play in these struggles.