FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI / KOOZ I would like to start with the title of the exhibition and ask how you approach the term 'conviviality.' How is this representative of the work you undertake with COMUNAL, and in what ways does it draw upon and expand the work of philosopher Ivan Illich?

COMUNAL Iván Illich approaches the term "conviviality" from a critical and complex perspective that integrates themes such as schooling and the professionalization of knowledge, industrial production and the habits it brought with it: the denaturalization of humanity or its uprooting — looking at ourselves from outside of nature — as well as the invention of needs and values useful to the capitalist mode of production. This framework produces ways of relating to each other based on segregation and the creation of social classes (for example, educated people vs. supposedly ignorant people), the degradation of nature, the creation of dominant institutions, and imposing public policies that contribute to the loss of our autonomy and the breakdown of social fabrics.

"Conviviality," Illich explains, is a way of being/existing/living that seeks to recover the autonomous action of peoples, value the situated knowledge that is produced outside of institutions, define our own relational needs, create modes of production that seek the multidimensional balance of life, and establish cultural thresholds or limits of growth. In other words, a convivial society is one in which well-being is not based on excessive consumption, endless production, and the exploitation of nature, but one in which organized communities have the possibility of shaping the image of their own future. Illich carefully warns that this does not imply a return to the chains of the past, taking refuge in the utopia of the noble savage or rejecting modern tools, but rather rethinking the relationship we establish with them. His proposal is to use technology and tools as means to achieve our common goals, defining the right tools as those that expand the power of collective action and reject the creation of oppressive relationships.

“I call a convivial society that in which the modern tool is at the service of the person integrated into the community and not at the service of a body of specialists. Convivial is the society in which man controls the tool.” - Ivan Illich, 1978.

The above topics do not exhaust the diversity of fascinating reflections that Illich sets forth in his text. However, they have served as reflections for us to look at ourselves and critically-affectively question our collaborative work. Perhaps our contribution to the topic of conviviality is to share how we have witnessed and experienced it in the various territories in which we have collaborated in Social Production and Management of Habitat (SP&MH) processes, as well as to exemplify in a concrete and situated way some concepts that can hardly be understood from the abstract.

We understood and (in)corporated conviviality — we pass it through the body and the affections, not only through reason — from common action in different territories where the peoples, collectives, and organized groups with which we collaborate have created fair tools and organizational, constructive, and pedagogical technologies aimed at the common well-being and care of life. These tools and technologies arise from a plurality of cosmo-experiences (or pluriverses, as Arturo Escobar would say) that oppose capitalist logic. Philosophies of life that not only reject the objectification of the world and recognize the interdependent link we have with life in its multiple manifestations but also crack the myth of the universal: we inhabit a world where many worlds exist, as the Zapatistas put it.

Illich's warnings seem current and timely to us since the ethical-political position of SP&MH is constantly categorized as a romantic vision of living that dismisses technological advances or modern tools. However, this is a racist and colonial approach that understands tools and technology as that which is produced exclusively by professionals and in institutional spaces such as laboratories, universities, or research centers. On the contrary, we understand the act of design as a convivial and unschooled knowledge that has historically made possible the creation of building tools and technologies to socially produce habitat. This is how vernacular construction systems (specific to each place and culture) emerged, based on self-management, mutual support, collective creativity, and the exercise of autonomy.

However, the professionalization of housing and the invention of architecture as a “disabling profession” — those that disable people’s common knowledge — had negative consequences on the historical ways of producing habitat. The professionalization of housing and all the institutional bureaucracy that it brought with it (schooling, degrees, construction standards, public policies, etc.) denies people the possibility of socially producing their habitat and categorizes vernacular-popular ways of living as “backward” or “precarious.” That is, those dwellings that are produced outside of industrial, capitalist and professional logic represent an “uncivilized” way of living that needs to be improved by the State and architects. These discourses are the basis of modern architectural thought that continues to be in force in schools to this day.

“This new housing code dictates minimum conditions that a worker, when building his house in his free time, cannot satisfy. Furthermore, the rent for any industrially built home alone exceeds the income of eighty percent of the population. This “decent housing,” as they say, can only be occupied by well-off people or by those to whom the law grants a housing subsidy.” - Ivan Illich, 1978.

In Mexico, the Housing Law and the National Housing Programs (as well as the operating rules of said programs) impose a way of living that responds to a modern and Eurocentric logic. For example, it is established that a home must have at least one living room, dining room, interior bathroom, and two bedrooms. However, in our country, there are 68 indigenous nations whose ways of being/existing/living do not fit into State regulations. The same happens with the self-produced popular neighborhoods in urban areas, where the ways of living are the result of community processes in constant evolution that go beyond the single-family home.

In addition, the production of housing promoted by public institutions favors industrial construction in collaboration with professionals and private companies, leaving out community and cooperative forms of producing habitat, whose basis is not the accumulation of wealth or the generation of surplus value but collective well-being. The distance is radical: the mercantile-capitalist mode of production sees housing as a means to generate wealth and an object of professional design, while the social mode of production understands housing as a use value and a cultural expression of the inhabitants. Likewise, the mercantile-capitalist mode of production generates environmental exploitation (a popular discussion within the guild in recent years) and oppressive relations, both of construction workers and of nature. On the other hand, the social production of habitat allows us to test the freedom of inhabitation, to put collective creativity into practice, and to choose our common future through self-managed processes that strengthen the community fabric.

Technological innovation in the SP&MH processes is constant because in the places where we have collaborated, there is a desire to improve traditional construction systems and integrate new ways of designing and producing habitat appropriate to each culture's current circumstances. Sometimes, this is a forced necessity due to dispossession, devastation of natural resources, or socio-ecological disasters that the State blames on nature, ignoring the role of public policies and private companies in climate change. However, these transformations must be decisions of the inhabitants, not imposed by professionals or laws. From an immaterial dimension, we understand that design is found in managing and organizing the social production of habitat, as well as in teaching-learning the knowledge that seeks to care for life. Social technologies (organizational, pedagogical, and managerial) require deep radical imagination to sustain community processes and to resist and re-exist in the face of ever-changing oppressive dynamics. These social technologies are not produced in academic or institutional spaces but in territories through encounters, collaboration, dialogue, celebration, and coexistence.

Design as a convivial tool has not ceased in the territories where we weave bonds of mutual support. On the contrary, “professional design” continues to use the same repetitive and homogeneous formula of producing habitat. Even the same patriarchs of architecture continue to be glorified, whose ideas are obsolete in the face of the socio-ecological crisis we are experiencing; a formula that, in addition, has demonstrated its failure to satisfy the needs of habitability around the world and its generous contribution to the environmental crisis. For us, conviviality lies in those supportive ways of producing habitat that make collective emancipation possible and allow us to try out the freedom of inhabitation, while at the same time cultivating the care of life.

KOOZ Specifically, the exhibition opens with an infographic that explores your understanding of what it means to care for life. Could you elaborate on how this concept is embedded within notions of relational pedagogies, solidarity networks, questions of autonomy, cohabitation, and other related themes?

COMUNAL For us, reflective-affective processes are important because they allow us to critically question our ways of doing/feeling/thinking with others and to incorporate (passing through the body and the affections) new knowledge. They also enable us to try out new ways of being with/in the world that align with our notions of justice and the freedom to inhabit.

The conception of the exhibition "CONVIVIALITY" began with feeling, thinking, and questioning from genuine curiosity, our common practices in diverse geographies. Through reflective-critical-affective workshops, conducted with our team and with the curatorial accompaniment of Marielsa Castro, we rethought the meaning of participation and collaboration in SP&MH based on the importance of coexistence and the care of life to sustain relational processes of integral transformation.

This path led to questions such as: What is the space-time of conviviality? What do we care for through conviviality? Through what processes of resistance and re-existence do we practice conviviality? With whom do we form solidarity networks? With whom do we co-inhabit the territory?

By reflecting on these questions, we understood conviviality as a set of diverse, interrelated, and situated pedagogies that arise from each territory and culture to sustain the care of life. For us, to socially produce the habitat is to live together and teach-learn from a space-time that is created in common under the gaze of interdimensional justice. These reflections arise from encounters with others and from the solidarity pedagogies we witness in diverse geographies; ways of teaching-learning that are built in practice through mutual support and the will to share ourselves; ways of being, existing, and inhabiting that transformed our way of being with/in the world.

We had long conversations among ourselves and with some of our colleagues who have shared this path of SP&MH. Reliving moments of joy and moments of conflict moved us. As colleagues, we had the opportunity to discuss processes, transformations, feelings, and moments we had not collectively named before. As a team that collaborates with other groups and communities, we were fortunate to build new bridges of dialogue that made possible the creation and interconnection of discourses, exhibition pieces, and new narratives. This was extremely enriching since some processes occurred several years ago, and reflections change over time.

The collective reflection that we carried out for five months gradually nourished the infographic of the systemic map, weaving the threads, networks, collaborations, community organizations, social struggles, and justice that we seek from our collaborative thinking/feeling/doing. And, at the center of all these efforts and collaborations, we find “CARE FOR LIFE.”

KOOZ You refer to the exhibition as an 'intercultural reflection' that weaves from different spaces-times and experiences. What geographies and temporalities does the exhibition draw upon? How do these practices platform and unfold collaborative means of cohabitation as both a means and an end?

COMUNAL The exhibition is a journey through different ways of being/existing/living that put into practice their own convivial tools and technologies. In each space-time, life is managed and organized differently. However, there are shared values such as mutual support, cooperation, and the exchange of knowledge that enable the social production of habitat. For us, it was a process to understand that each place has its own rhythm and that participation is also a cultural manifestation: not all people participate, manage, and organize in the same way. That is why it is essential to listen, learn, and know the socio-ecological structures in order not to impose ways of designing, building, and producing habitat that are alien to the inhabitants or damage community fabrics.

We speak of an intercultural reflection because we put into dialogue different convivial tools and technologies, as well as the cosmo-experiences that created them. For example, in the exhibition, we can hear the voice of Roselia Rosado, who tells us about the importance of Guendalizaa in Ixtepec, a word that in Zapotec means "mutual aid and cooperation." Guendalizaa was a social and organizational technology that allowed the people of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec to rebuild their homes after the earthquakes of 2017. We can also hear the voice of Silviano Ruíz, one of the first to tell us about housing as a living subject with whom the territory is co-inhabited and a representation of the god who created the world. In Don Silviano’s text and audio, we can understand the importance of vernacular living and its intimate links with the philosophy of the Mixe people and community sciences, which is why they defended their way of building/living with adobe before the State.

Other reflections present in the exhibition are the artistic creations of the students of the Rural Productive School of Tepetzintan (Northeastern Sierra of Puebla), whose objective is to defend the Nahuatl language. For this reason, they created murals, poems, stories, and traditional medicine manuals in their own language, breaking the colonial and racist educational system that imposes Spanish as the official language. The struggle of the young people is, precisely, the right to a culturally appropriate education. If we continue the tour and go to the State of Chiapas, we will be able to see the processes that the community group of Loma Bonita and the Cocina CoLaboratorio collective are carrying out to defend food sovereignty and put into practice sustainable ways of cultivating the land. And so we could continue exemplifying each of the processes that weave this reflection from different cultures.

In each of these spaces-times, participation and convivial tools are different since they arise from the interrelations that the inhabitants have with their territory. However, each of them seeks to care for life: language, housing as a living subject, traditional medicine, seeds, land, plants, traditional ways of farming, the health of women and children, among other aspects. For us, the most important thing is to recognize that the spaces we collaboratively design and produce in common are never the end, but rather one of the many creative means that organized groups use to strengthen their struggles and defend life.

The importance of our work lies in the processes of social production of habitat that allow us to try out more just and livable worlds in the present — the end is never spatial production. That is why we speak of SP&MH as an ethical-political position or a theory-action in which it is essential to put into practice the notions of justice and the values that we defend. It would be contradictory to seek spatial justice through production processes that generate exploitation of people and their territories. And here we find another important difference with the "architecture of patriarchy," since it is increasingly common to hear about "social architecture" or "social housing" from the discursive sphere. However, the production processes and the socio-ecological relations that are put into practice continue to respond to a colonial, racist, and capitalist logic. This is what we mean by saying that the means and the ends must go hand in hand: social justice begins with the production of space and the relations that contribute to creating said processes, not with the use of places.

KOOZ These experiences have been organized through four relational pedagogies: Cooperate and Share Life, Heal and Care for the Body-Spirit, Defend and Cultivate the Territory, and ultimately Create and Name the World-Universe. What kinds of practices and projects do these pedagogies unravel? How interconnected and overlapping are these?

COMUNAL During the reflection process to create the exhibition, we faced the challenges of complexity. We needed to categorize the social processes to facilitate communication and understanding while explaining how projects and pedagogies interconnect. For this reason, we decided to categorize the SP&MH processes according to the knowledge and teaching-learning methods of each place that radically transformed our way of understanding the world. We started by recognizing that each of the processes contains all the pedagogies we name, as they are part of an interrelated whole. However, classifying involved establishing a narrative order that would facilitate reading and respond to the lived experiences we have shared.

This way of representing pedagogies is our own effort and an open reflection to communicate what we have learned from different geographies and, like all efforts, it is a process that will continue to transform and expand. It is a constant challenge to share what we have experienced in the territories with the inhabitants, especially because academic, artistic, or professional language imposes important barriers. In addition, it is necessary to recognize the limits of concepts, diagrams, photographs, texts, or schemes, since they will never be able to transmit the experience lived in a collective.

Another challenge is that pedagogies or community sciences — as Silviano Ruiz, a community scientist from Coatlán who participates in the exhibition, calls them — do not conceive science in a fragmented or linear way but as a network of relational knowledge that is at the service of life. The values ​​of disjunction and fragmentation are typical of the Western scientific method (Cartesian thought), a way of generating knowledge based on the paradigm of simplification and binarization of the world: feeling/thinking, nature/culture, feminine/masculine, subject/object. That is why the community sciences and pedagogies we name are, in reality, an amalgam of subjective, affective, historical knowledge rooted in the land where it is impossible to draw borders.

For example, defending the ways of creating and naming the world — as is the case of the inhabitants of Coatlán in the Sierra Mixe of Oaxaca and the students of the Rural Productive School in Tepetenzintan, Sierra Nororiental of Puebla — has an interdependent relationship with cooperation, the defense of the territory, food autonomy, and the spirituality of each people. That is why linguist Yásnaya Aguilar clarifies that native languages ​​do not die, “our languages ​​are killed when our territories are not respected.” Another clear example is the case of the network of midwives Un único corazón (One Single Heart) who care for the body and spirit of both women and children in their territory. Their work would be impossible without communal ownership of the land and the Tseltal language as the main vehicle through which midwifery knowledge travels. Therefore, defending the language ensures that the knowledge to manage health in a communal and autonomous way can be transmitted from generation to generation.

That is why we also recognize the urgency of addressing justice from an interdimensional perspective, since there can be no racial justice without epistemic, linguistic, environmental, symbolic, and spatial justice, among others. Like pedagogies or community sciences, the justice defended by the groups with which we collaborate is complex and relational: they seek respect for their autonomous ways of managing life. In other words, they defend the freedom to be, exist, and inhabit within their own frameworks of coexistence created in common. We, of course, share this plural vision of the world.

Bio

Comunal is a working group made up of four colleagues from different geographies: Mexico City, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Quintana Roo and Venezuela. They are moved to collaborate in processes for the social production and management of the habitat with inhabitants, organized people and collectives from different territories. They seek to contribute to the construction of other possible worlds based on mutual support, the exercise of autonomy and the search for interdimensional justice, using participatory design as a convivial tool that enables life care and freedom of inhabiting.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Prior to dedicating her full attention to KoozArch, Federica collaborated with the architecture studio and non-profit agency for change UNA/UNLESS working on numerous cultural projects and the research of "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.