In this conversation between two Colombian practitioners, we explore language and mapping as tools that have been used to systematise and oppress — yet which can be expanded and unlocked. Artist and architect Antonio Bermudéz Obregón discusses indigeneity, imagination and irony with educator, architect and researcher Catalina Mejía Moreno.

This conversation is part of KoozArch's issue "Polyglot".

FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI/KOOZLet me start by asking you to introduce yourselves.

ANTONIO BERMUDÉZ OBREGÓNWell, I'm Antonio Bermudéz. I'm an architect and artist. Actually, I studied art before architecture, then I studied architecture — I've always been in between both practices, jumping back and forth, this is how I've managed to live within multiple practices. I think we studied in the same university, Catalina, and I am based in Bogotá — for one year and a half, I lived in the Netherlands doing this residency at the Jan Van Eyck Academy, but now I’m mainly here in Bogotá.

CATALINA MEJÍA MORENOAnd I am Catalina Mejía Moreno; I was ‘formed’ as an architect at the same university as Antonio. I worked in Los Andes University in Bogotá for some time, and after that I came to the UK to pursue a master’s degree in architectural history at the Bartlett and eventually, a PhD in architectural theory and criticism at Newcastle University. So after practicing as an ‘architect’ — by which I mean to say, building buildings — I stepped out of ‘architecture’ understood as building proper, and into the world of academia, words and more. This is also within the realms of spatial practice, more widely speaking, so this is an understanding of architecture that is more expansive, rather than solely focused on building objects or an object-based practice.

I've been living in the UK for almost two decades; I teach at Central Saint Martins, where I lead on Climate Studies across Spatial Practices. My work here focuses on racial, spatial, social justice, and I'm interested in thinking with socio-ecological realities and imaginaries. This is getting rather long as an introduction, but I think it's important for me to mention that being a Colombian in the UK, I feel the need of building a bridge between different worlds, and that's where I’m at now.

KOOZI love that you're both architects by training yet your careers expanded into different ways of working, beyond buildings. As you might know, Polyglot is an issue which has a quest to grow our vocabulary as we expand the potentials of spatial practice. Can you situate your approach to this idea of language, potentially as a way of reading territory.

ABOI believe that language has been, at the same time, the first act of orientation and the ultimate tool of dominance. I think it's always in between these two extremes. When you name something, you force it to participate in one or another cosmological system; you tear it down from chaos or darkness, or from a void. This is the conception of naming stuff — of putting names on mountains, on trees, on spaces. Naming something is simultaneously the original act of private property. To name a piece of land is the same as drawing borders. It's like a superposition and imposition of a new layer on a map; language is like the layer on top of the map. So my work resides between these two concepts: orientation and dominance.

Language also transcends words, really, in my work, because it's getting into the territory of landscape. I've seen that landscape and the built environment in general are like a text that can be read. Most recently I've been reading landscapes and reading nature, even reading plants, more texts. It's perhaps one way of saying that I'm seeing images as language and text — that might be a good introduction to my work.

CMMI think language, as you say, I guess understood here as verbal language, is the ultimate tool of domination, but it is also a primary tool for liberation, resistance and possibility. So in a way, when you mentioned the act of naming, I was reminded of the diaries of Alexander van Humboldt, when he was going down the Magdalena River, with the bogas taking him down the river. The bogas are originally enslaved indigenous and African men, and later free people of African descent that navigated the Magdalena river in XVIII century Colombia. Humboldt couldn't understand the sounds that the bogas were making, nor what they were saying which for him was exclusionary and led to ‘name’ them as ‘inferiors.’

At the same time all he wanted was to extract knowledge — to get all the information they could give him, as the bogas held the knowledge of the water, of the river, of the landscape in which he was immersing himself into. In a way this colonial act of bestowing knowledge and the act of (re)naming those landscapes comes from that very discomfort of not understanding. It poses the question of who creates and holds what type of knowledge, how, and the impact of engaging with language(s) which is enormous. That speaks to what you were saying in terms of the ultimate tool of domination. Yet I believe in the importance of treating it as this tool of resistance and possibility: language at the service of life. Wouldn’t it be nice if that would always be the case - what could it do for us?

KOOZCatalina, your research explores the value associated with certain knowledge systems and the languages that these embody — building on the work of people like Katherine McKittrick. What forms of knowledge or languages has your research landed upon: has it brought you back to Colombia and what kind of knowledge systems, or what are their geographies and spaces?

CMMThat's an interesting question. The question of language, for me, surfaced when I arrived to the UK and has been with me since. It was driven by dislocation. By a need to honour, respect, and understand who I am here, who and what I carry with me, while navigating a context that is not mine, and now acting within one that historically has relied on languages to categorise, name and control; to possess. Also understanding that we carry different knowledges and different languages. Not only oral, written and verbal, but also as gestures, wonders, songs, curiosities, ‘grooves’, which is an understanding that Katherine McKittrick, as well as Sylvia Wynter, Carol Boyce Davies, M. NourbeSe Philip, and other black radical thinkers including Caribbean and Latin American voices, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Yuderys Espinosa Miñoso, Adriana Guzmán and so many others have brought to the table; a desire for knowledge through openness and for a search of a language that can carry and hold both intimacies and respite.

I find that there's also resistance to descriptive or induced answers — to data driven or scientific answers — in terms of the work I do. In terms of climate studies, for example: in the UK the climate crisis is largely understood through a very technocratic perspective; of course, one ought not to generalise, but this is a common trait. That approach requires a particular language; it demands that the way that we act is solution driven and immediate; contractual. In many ways that disregards questions of long histories, ancestral ties and other knowledges; the politics of language and of location. As a Colombian educator in a multicultural school, this approach recognises multiplicity in one same space: it's a question of being open and acting together. But also, of searching for life affirming practices through something that we all share: bodies and words.

I’ll talk about a project, to be more precise: we have been working with the Indigenous Inga community in Colombia for some time, on a publication entitled Inga kaugsai — or Inga dwelling in English. It is a project co-developed in collaboration with Colombian architect Juliana Ramírez, and Inga indigenous architects Pedro Jajoy, Jhon Tisoy and Musu Jacanamijoy, in dialogue with the Inga Peoples from Colombia, Spatial Practices staff and students and the graphic designer Abbie Vickress. It is a quest to revisit ancestral values and lived relationships for the Inga community in Colombia, a community whose very language is being threatened as we speak; this would be disastrous not only for the language, but also their ancestral practices of life. For the Inga, as for other Andean knowledges, the question of language is a recognition of a relational interconnection with environments beyond people. Language is relational. The question of relationality is very important here. I want to bring a word into this conversation, to give you an example — a very beautiful word: palabrear, for which I don't know an exact translation. It’s somewhat like ‘worlding’ but also expresses the process of entering a dialogue and the act of bringing to life ideas, thoughts, dreams, and visions through the spoken word whilst respecting its spiritual dimensions. Or words now familiar in the UK and co-opted in some spaces such as minga — community, collective work and thought. It is a language of kinship; this is something Taita Hernando Chindoy Chindoy taught me. Bringing language to the fore is one way of bringing knowledges to the fore.

KOOZThinking about those endangered languages: in your work with students at CSM, you aim to construct new glossaries. What is the importance of creating these glossaries, and how might they propose alternative ways of being in the world?

CMMI can connect this with my previous answer. Sticking with the Inga Kaugsai book project — which is very much present at CSM — it's also a pedagogical action through which we try to ‘weave worlds’ between the Inga community and that of students of Spatial Practices and wider worlds. I will also weave this together with another project called Pororoca, a project funded by re:arc institute, in which the question of language through glossaries has become central.

To give you a little bit of context, Pororoca is a project that arose when I received a grant from re:arc to develop an open curriculum. I invited Felipe Arturo from Colombia and Gabriella Leandro Pereira from Brazil to join me as we immersed ourselves in the context of three different estuaries to co-create an open curriculum — understanding the estuary as these places where river and sea collide, but also as a metaphor for embracing and merging as a reality. We met with friends and very different communities — lots of different people living by and with water — as we tried to understand the reality of inhabiting and nurturing these beautifully complex places. One of the more meaningful experiences was the way they offered words and gestures — languages — as gifts and as offerings; not to us, but to the water. This marked me deeply. The question of how we listen to these environments unfolded into a “glossary” (I am still undecided as to whether that is the right term) as a way of recognising the spatial politics these languages embody, and the knowledges that are embedded in these distinct landscapes. A ‘glossary’ that enacts the care held within the acts of listening across shores where their struggles and practices of resistance, joy and love were shared; a ‘glossary’ that, as through F. Fanon’s words, brings together cultural resistances through language — I am also grateful to Alice Grandoit-Šutka for our conversations around this. For example, in the ‘glossary,’ water appears not as H2O, nor as ‘resource’ or ‘liquid substance found somewhere’ but rather as follows: The waters have always been a reference to the Iabás, who are the women of Candomblé, in the words of Wagner Moreira. Or the waters of Yemanjá, or Oxúm — per the words of Cibele Bonfim, describing a physical and geographic place as much as a living deity. This speaks to different livelihoods and ancestralities. To a different relation to life, to a particular place, a particular socio-ecological reality, future and imaginary. Not one to be extracted but one to be nurtured.

Words set things in motion; words conjure as Toni Cade Bambara tells us. But as she also reminds us, we need to be careful what we give voice to. These ‘glossaries’ therefore open these wor(l)ds of possibilities, as well as making visible what for some worlds has remained invisible. I also stop to think here, as there have been so many glossaries published recently; it is something there to look at carefully. But overall, it feels like a collective desire to break structures and open spaces — as long as they don’t become, once more, tools for hegemonical practices or cultural imperialism. With my students at CSM, the ‘glossary’ — now entitled Greetings Wordling — has been taking shape as an exercise of situatedness, and of collective thinking that foregrounds both the politics and poetics of words. At different moments throughout the year, and together with my teaching colleague Eliot Haworth, we offer a term that relates to the climate crisis as an invitation and provocation. For instance, “entanglement”; I would then ask the students to respond with a different word, either in English or not. This becomes a dialogue, through which ‘entanglement’ can be read through a multiplicity of words and short narratives offered by the students. In this way, the ‘glossary’ keeps growing and extrapolating; again, it is an act of weaving. Words become devices, dispositifs, vessels; again, ways of honouring multiple worlds held in one classroom. This would seem to confirm the understanding that language is, first of all, porous, and not neutral. But also importantly — essentially, really — and going back to Humboldt, seeing language as the first defence against identity loss, and a form of climate action. The advent of easy digital translation seems to suggest that language is universal, that we can achieve flatness, but in fact it's totally the opposite.

KOOZOn one hand, you're working on a publication that takes a certain position; on the other, you’re developing a form of pedagogy within the setting of an academic programme. What is the value of disseminating and researching within these distinct contexts?

CMMThat's a nice question. The Inga publication raised some big questions for us… For instance, what is the best way of honouring the Inga ancestral knowledges shared through work that we did across various ancestral territories across the Andes and the Amazon regions of Colombia? The idea of the publication really came from our Inga co-authors and friends. Their initial suggestion was to develop an infografía — an infographic or comic book — for children, but that idea grew. The book became a way of honouring, respecting and being grateful for the knowledge and memory that the communities have shared, at the different resguardos and lugares de vida with us. It’s also a way of safeguarding some of that knowledge and language. Once finished it will be taken to various Inga schools — as many as we can — and other educational spaces of the Inga community, as a way to re-acknowledge their own ancestral being in this world.

Again, for a little context, the publication was put together in Spanish — language we share, then translated to Inga, and into English as well. So it's a collective and collaborative way of weaving worlds, but also of recognising Inga as the mother tongue. For all of us, the priority is that it can live in the Inga community, like a milestone to which they could always return. But for us as well, it was also important to open it to the wider world.

In terms of the academic world, I like to think of language also as a pedagogical enquiry. Yesterday, I was having a conversation about how asking students to engage with words is a non-inclusive practice. Something that is true, but asking for a detailed architectural section can be as well. In a way, to sit with language — primarily, languages enable space for more nuanced, relational and affective conversations that can transgress the academic enclosure but can also live within it. Language enables forms of action — as well as friction — that are generative; neither fixed nor universal, articulating different spatial logics, climate responses and possibilities of collectivity.

KOOZIt is also a little bit of a reflection on the importance of oral histories, right? Certain traditions of orality form the grounding of such communities, while in a Western centric perspective, oral histories are not valued in the same way. Does the project also platform the importance of this way of transmitting, conveying and safeguarding knowledge?

CMMThis is an important point. We had lots of debates whether to translate these oral histories into the written word — precisely because not everyone has access to written word and because the nature of the knowledges that the book holds is oral. Translation can be very violent as well, specifically as we're talking about indigenous communities under threat. But it is important to note that this subject came up in our conversations and sharing spaces with the communities, in the territories and then in Bogotá, and within the authorial team it was a constant dialogue. There is this desire and need to ensure that these oral histories become paper-based histories, as they will reach spaces where otherwise they wouldn't exist, as well as keep voices of elders that one day won’t be with us, and that was very important. In a way, what we decided — and this is a pluricultural team — is that this publication could be a form of continuation for those oral histories, albeit in a different format. Of course, they lose their orality, but hopefully will retain the affect and potency as inherited knowledge once they are shared within educational spaces, as well as the existing sharing spaces within the inner community. Perhaps there are other histories, even oral histories that they can relate to; in that way it is also an invitation. The book doesn't profess to fix anything; it’s in flux. The publication is never seen as an ending in itself but as an opening, an invitation to enter in conversation; hopefully more oral histories can become part of it or of another, future anthology or other.

ABOI have a question there. It's no lie that indigenous communities are subjects of conservation themselves: their culture, their language and their territories. Their knowledge, as we understand it, is really linked to nature and to very specific parts of the landscape. Do you think this glossary could help guide the politics of conservation? Could it help people to really know what there is to keep or to protect in the territory? I have always thought that preserving a culture, a language or a cosmical mythology without conserving its territorial and natural milestone is absurd.

CMMIn a way it does, but the intention is not only to protect landscapes or a specific indigenous heritage, but also to protect their ancestral knowledge. For the Inga there is no human/nature split. And to think about preservation as a separation between the Inga peoples — or other indigenous communities, and their ‘natural landscapes’ is dangerous as it can imply that that separation is not just possible but desirable. There’s a cosmovision involved when we understand the way in which a particular place gains a word in Inga that embodies a territory. There is not, as we say, this mountain named XYZ because cartography says so, or this river named ABC because it’s a name we repeat blindly after being named by colonisers. The Inga indigenous cosmovision, as many other ancestral peoples, puts these phenomena in relation to one another. What is beautiful is that body, territory and language are not separated from one another; they are one — which is something that I think you also explore, Antonio. It is, of course, can be seen as a form of preservation, but it goes beyond that. It is a recognition of a way of being in the world. More than a conservation of a particular site or landscape, it’s a conservation and an acknowledgement of possible livelihoods.

KOOZAntonio, you work between architecture and visual research, on the semantics of territory within the context of Colombia. What brought you to investigate this situation — does it come from an architectural or artistic perspective? How far does your dual understandings of territory — between the architectural and the artistic or photographic — define the way that you document this relationship?

ABOI've been studying landscapes and their semantics, if not in Colombia, then always from the context of Colombia. Being based here has created a particular point of view, where I see other landscapes in a different way. But I can also see how people from other places might perceive the landscape here. This observation is really the seed of everything. In fact, I actually started with a project I made around some Humboldtian engravings and their variations, going back to something Catalina mentioned earlier. I became a bit obsessive, collecting copies of one particular engraving — a little drawing of the Chimborazo mountain that Humboldt made, which was remade as an engraving back in Europe. This image was sent all over the world, describing the Latin American landscape, between the 18th and 19th century. It was the perfect time in history to reveal this, because America was just becoming open to public knowledge in Europe. Everybody was very curious about how the Latin American landscape was, but of course there was no photography, and no aeroplanes. There was really a drive to describe the entire Latin American landscape very quickly; to contain its knowledge, which was a bit absurd.

Even so, publishers in Europe started to create these glossaries of plants and elements, and create this collage or a cadavre exquis of (for example) Mexican plants, Colombian landscapes, Ecuadorian people and Argentinian animals, all on the same image — creating this singular American image. So I started to collect these variations of Chimborazo mountains. It was really nice, because I found almost everything on eBay and antique shops all around the world; it seems that often people would buy this engraving and then colour it in themselves. Imagine an old lady in Poland colouring the Chimborazo mountain: where to put the snow, where to put the green? Is it green? Or is it red or blue? I don't know. So I had this growing collection of many interpretations of the same landscape.

But then I went to the Netherlands, specifically to the Jan van Eyck Academy, but the Netherlands in general was where this idea took its ultimate shape. For me, the whole country is like a Humboldtian engraving in some strange way, like a collage of nature. My first instinct there was to look for the idea of wilderness or ferality in the Netherlands. I found some interesting things, but the most important fact is that there is no wilderness. One can cultivate plants to look more like a forest than a garden, and wild animals are being bred there — there is a construction of this feral image, but in reality its origins are artificial, or at least, culture and nature have blended together completely. That's where I understood that I could superimpose, following the ideas of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, that there is Mannerism in architecture. You can apply this Mannerism in architecture to landscape as well.

To draw a parallel with Venturi and Scott Brown, they propose that if you place a window on a shed, you make it a house. If something looks like a house, you can make it a house, right? I think if you plant a palm tree somewhere, you make it look like the tropics — it's the same idea. That's where I really clarified my understanding of landscape semantics. You want to create something that is artificial, but you use real plants: this turns the landscape into a text that can be read. I live in Bogota, and the whole mountainside is planted with pine trees and eucalyptus. None of them are native to Bogota, but somebody decided that it should look a little bit like the Alps or like Australia, I don't know. To somehow make the landscape be itinerant also. This is how one might arrive at a process of landscape semantics.

CMMI have a sort of landscape semantics behind me. I have my little tropical garden with a banana tree, a pineapple, coffee, a yucca — so your method applies to the reading of landscape on my windowsill as well

PROYECTOS ABOSure, so you can feel a little bit ‘at home’...

KOOZYou mentioned collecting things on eBay, but I was wondering, how does your research method translate to maybe to projects like the one on show now in Bergamo, Toponyms for a Distracted State? How did your architectural perspective and tools enable you to approach the relationship between language and territory from a different perspective?

ABOI think that the process for that one is similar, but different. Every project I do comes first from a space of, if not boredom, then leisure — in Spanish we would say ocio, which is about having active ‘free’ time. With this project, I had been ‘flying around’ in Google Maps over Colombia and I began to find these names of places that seemed to be somewhere between funny and violent. So I started collecting, again: collecting these names and locating places. I made a rule that was to look only at the scale of the vereda, which is the smallest unit within the official division of territories, which meant flying at a specific altitude on Google Maps. I collected sixty or seventy names — I call them “also known as” or AKAs — before I realised that they were really located on specific parts of Colombian territory and Colombian history: these were mainly of regions or situations of land disposition and displacement; lands of paramilitary presence and recent conflict.

If you make a catalogue of the veredas — these small townships — in Colombia, many of their names are deeply linked to the landscape, to culture, including indigenous names (like Muriba, Chiquinquirá, Maripi, Fúquene, for example). Perhaps in the more colonial parts, there are some Spanish and religious names (for instance, Santa Cruz, Santa Ana, La María). But there are also regions of open grassland — where now there is mostly cattle — that have really been witnesses to major land conflict. These sites often have absurd names, like No Te Veo (I can´t see you), Dios te Salve (May god save you), El Desastre (The Disaster) or El Engaño (The Deception), where you really understand that no natural feature of the land led to their naming. This was a discovery for me. Going back to your question, about how I conceive this aerial view of watching the world through Google Maps: for me, it's one way to evidence my urban privilege; I can just see from outside and study from outside without being affected by the situations there.

But I also did another project — almost like a twin of this one — called Alias. That’s a five year collection of all the criminal AKAs that appeared in the journals in Colombia. So I have thousands, almost two thousand AKAs that I found in the newspapers. Most interestingly, the AKAs are usually funny, even absurd, but they underlie some horrible truths. From my position of urban privilege — sitting on my couch reading the newspaper — this is something I could do and speak about. It's not just about seeing the country that's suffering, or even the territory that is suffering. People are suffering, and we are viewing that through urban privilege. For me, if I'm not feeling some thread of irony, I'm failing in my work. This is key; it has always been important in my art to treat subjects with irony.

CMMIn your work, Antonio, there’s something on which we overlap. Correct me if I'm wrong but the languages that we might bring speak to the types of knowledge we value, or like to think with: visual, sonic, oral, embodied… I think coming from a country like Colombia — where landscapes are referred to or imagined as being between like this tropical, paradisiac or completely violent extractive landscape — there are a series of extremes and categorisations that have defined the way these landscapes can be read, by the world but also by us. I think that somehow overlaps with the work I've been trying to do, to reclaim language, to reclaim those landscapes. Even when you were talking about this aerial view, for me it speaks to this disembodied but also very reclaiming approach towards reading a landscape.

ABOI think that the way that the Colombian, or rather the Latin American tropical landscape has been described — the language around it — has always been created from outside of it, never from within. As Colombians, we speak about our own landscape using strange and foreign concepts. I think about this a lot: nature described as exotic, beautiful, magical, violent. These are all imported concepts from the 19th century; the identity of Latin America was completely built by Europeans.

CMMOur work seems to try to escape or resist those languages that were imposed, and to recognise that languages, whether verbal or other, sonic, bodily, site-specific, situated, historical, cultural, contextual and landscape-led languages all have ways of being in the world too. But that also means that their power lies in their cultural definition and as a cultural defiance, as a refuge against cultural dominance.

ABOIt's also clear that there is an identity crisis in these countries; most of the northern part of Latin America doesn't know how to describe itself. We've been put all in the same basket — we are all Hispanic — but we are also partly indigenous. Well, there's a lot of work to be done there.

CMMAs Latin Americans, we come from a place of… how do I say this in English? For example, we are not “we”. Many of us cannot identify as black, as indigenous, as Spanish or as Portuguese, or other. We are often defined by that which we are not; by one absence or another. ‘Mixed other’ as per British ethnic categorisations. We are all meant to be Latin Americans — which again is a categorisation coming from outside, but how does that translate to other worlds? I see it across my students as well, for example, coming from the so-called Global South or post-colonial geographies: often their identities begin from a place of absence. The question of language is really key here, because it grounds and it acknowledges that there is a form of existence through words, gestures, love or joy — but not one that starts from a place of extraction and possession, rather quite the opposite.

KOOZHow do you associate with this idea of language as a tool for resistance in your research and works — that is, if you identify with the notion of resistance?

ABOI think this is an identity issue. We — our countries and our identities — have been described by and with languages from other places. So in that sense, language must become a way of describing ourselves again. From my perspective, it's not about decolonising but re-colonising, in a sense. It's about re-describing, starting from scratch. So maybe I wouldn't call it a tool of liberation but rather as an action. This idea is new to me, but I will think about it.

CMMI might need to think on this further too as there is so much to say here, but I firmly believe in the resistance(s) that language(s) embody. As a way of standing against the coloniality of language, finding in words space for action. I also believe in language as a tool for healing as it is for imagination. In the modern world there has been this fixed sense of being in the world, with a linear path to it. But it's much more beautiful, expansive and more nuanced. We could become attentive to rooted and embodied knowledges, not only scientific rules, which often govern written language and words.

KOOZAt the very beginning of the conversation, Antonio mentioned this idea of orientation versus dominance. I wanted to tie that back to the use of Google Maps: how much is it a tool for orientation, versus surveillance and dominance?

ABOI've always thought that colonisation is done on the drawing board, meaning that is made with the map. The map in general is, for sure, a tool for dominance and surveillance in the most basic way. You need a map to mark and protect property on the land. But Google Maps can also be seen as some kind of generous God that allows you to share his omnipresent view. I wouldn't necessarily demonise this tool, because I really like it.

CMMI was thinking about what you said about irony. It's so important to be playful. If we think about maps as ironic tools, as opposed to a scientific one, that allows us to do so many other things.

ABOAnd they surely have scientific pretensions, right? They present something definitive: this is the world, this is how it is.

KOOZDuring a research project on Antarctica, we found that at a certain level of zoom, Google Maps crashes: we saw images of pixels from 2002 to 2005. It was interesting to see that map revealed as a multitude of realities or truths in collision. Perhaps there is a beauty in the glitch: in parallel with the transformation of the territory, there’s a transformation in how we understand it.

ABOI've always thought that Google Maps is a quest just to own everything. But this is a process, as you say, across time. On Street View you can move one block forward, and one building disappears, and a new one appears on the right. The plan is to get everything from Toponyms, the work that is in Bergamo, documented to a proper level resolution. Currently there are different resolutions available for the various sites, because of the difference in geographical and territorial conditions. Perhaps on the day they were taking the photo, there was a cloud. This is how it is: sometimes there is a cloud, so they cannot take the photo. But if you look at New York, for example, everything is 3D-rendered to perfection. So of course there are priorities, which align with where the money comes from. At the outskirts of the world, there is less resolution. The objective is to get everything in full resolution, but it would take decades to accomplish this.

CMMIn terms of priorities, it’s worth noting in these maps that that Gaza, for example, is [at the time of publishing] still demarcated as before the genocide. What constitutes the histories that these tools are telling us, what are the politics behind it. It’s also worth thinking about this view from above that can be controlled, and controlling — it’s quite problematic and difficult to comprehend.

KOOZWell, thank you both for this conversation.

CMMThank you so much for inviting us, it was such a joy to have this exchange in the same space with Antonio, yet oceans apart.

ABOIt was a very nice conversation, thank you so much.

Bios

Antonio Bermudéz-Obregón is a Colombian architect and a visual researcher, at present investigating matters related to landscape semantics and territory in parallel to his architectural practice, Proyectos ABO. He was an artist in residence during 2019 and 2020 at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in the Netherlands, and in 2021 at Maniffatura Tabacchi in Florence, Italy. Bermudéz-Obregón’s dual practice intertwines territory and its different meanings working within the intersection of culture and land. His work deals with topics such as orientation, geopolitics, toponymy, colonialism, exoticism and the imaginary of nations. His primary objective has been to find the tools to dismantle the intricate collage through which we construct ourselves within nature and which explains our relation to land.

Catalina Mejía Moreno is a sea swimmer, spatial practitioner, educator and researcher. She is the Climate Studies Lead across Spatial Practices. Since joining CSM she has been working in developing the Climate Forum (climate-forum.com), a research, curriculum and exchange platform that brings the urgent focus of the climate and ecological emergency to the core of the Spatial Practices Programme. Current research projects include a forthcoming publication in collaboration with the Inga Indigenous Peoples of Colombia that foregrounds Inga ancestral inhabitation knowledges as a seeding ground for the Inga AWAI forthcoming University; and Pororoca: Abraz(ç)o de río y mar, a collaborative process-based curriculum funded by re:arc institute that, through deep listening, allows for time and space to nurture conviviality, kinship and co-creation as the basis for reparative situated dialogues and practices.

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.