FEDERICA ZAMBELETTI / KOOZ The title of this year’s IABR exhibition is Nature of Hope. Does hope lie within our built environment and its infrastructures, or does it lie someplace and somewhere else, within other fields and spaces?

KELLER EASTERLINGIt's a good question, because hope is not just a soft emotional feeling. Hope is made of resources and potentials in the world. Architects are often trying to show the way in which space stores those potentials, how it possesses those resources around which one can build hope and projections for the future. The show is transposing hope into a material world and a set of temporal practices.

CATHERINE KOEKOEK In a way, we're of course trying to bring hope to that material context. On the other hand, one of the reasons we're talking about hope is because a lot of practitioners — I would say also a lot of people in general — are feeling a kind of blockage, a sense that we cannot go on like we did before. We sense that we need to work in a different way, that we need to start relating to the world, to each other and to our practice in a different way. But the existing infrastructures and material conditions, as well as extant social conditions don't seem to allow for that.

Within the exhibition, we're trying to sort of map these blockages, but also the tactics and strategies to try and work differently, right? It’s what we're also trying to do through the public programme and the Practice Place — we're trying to get together and build those routes collectively: to build these alternative infrastructures for a hopeful practice, which too often seems blocked by the existing infrastructures. Yeah, we're trying to collectively build that ‘otherwise’, I would say.

KOOZ Hani, having worked on the exhibition with Catherine and the other curators, what’s your perspective on the nature of the exhibition — and on where hope lies for you? How has that informed what you decided to platform within the Biennale?

HANI SALIH There's a lot of overlap in the points that Catherine has expressed but for me, it's about the practice rather than the product itself — this idea of foregrounding alternative ways of doing and different ways of connecting speaks to the idea that practice is about more than the final outcome, it can also be about the things that you explore and enable when you think of design as a conversation. Hope lies in the steps towards making something — that's where there are moments of change. My perspective particularly comes in trying to recognise that everything exists within a system and that systems are all interconnected, geographically, financially and politically . Specifically, the practice of architecture is almost at the end of the chain — not necessarily in a very literal sense, but it's often subject to infrastructures or decisions made outside of its context, somewhere further up that chain, which determine how something lands or touches the ground at any site. Looking at the process is one way of trying to understand what parameters are actually influencing the practice itself, and also to identify moments of change or points of tension. Those are potentially really effective moments to sort of maximise effort, energy or labour. All of us in the curatorial team had quite complementary perspectives on what we think is necessary to move towards an alternative and more just form of practice. It's oriented around the understanding that it's not necessarily about the end product; actually, the moments of change and hope are in the process, rather than in built form.

CK As a feminist and a political theorist, I'm really inspired by Sara Ahmed and the way that she describes or analyses institutions, which also comes from a deeply practice or experience-based perspective. It's as if you only notice certain things — what norms are present, what is or isn't possible — by running into these walls that may well be invisible beforehand. I think within the exhibition, because of the focus on actual practices — what they are running into and what tactics they are developing to go around these blockages — one starts to show what might not be visible beforehand. Of course, the hope is that by doing so, we can create alternatives as well.

KE It's a fundamental sea change of knowledge. It's not about knowing that, like knowing the answer, but about knowing how to do things and react to things.

KOOZ Akil, you work with your hands at Resolve — indeed, you’re joining us from the middle of a community event today — in creating equitable visions of change in our built environment. So for you, hope really lies in a redefinition of the environment and its infrastructures, right?

AKIL SCAFE-SMITH I think for us, we are interested in the tension that lies in hope. Earlier today, I was having a discussion with some colleagues, including a friend and practitioner from Palestine, about the nature of hope: it is a question on lots of lips. We're in a polycentric crisis worldwide, right? Actually, for oppressed peoples of the world, hope is something which is not tangible. We can't see it, and some of us can't feel it. There's a privilege to being here in the Global North, where we are yet to experience that level of hopelessness: we may have it communicated to us, but we're still able to meet our friends around the corner for a drink, and speak about it in theoretical terms. So to use that privilege is part of hope.

Often, there's a kind of desperation in reaching for hope, where we find ourselves at a certain point of pressure — that can manifest in lots of different ways. A great example is the event outside, where I am just now. We are working in a place called Angell Town in Brixton — a really important place in the socio-political Black history of Brixton. The event that we're facilitating is around housing support, particularly for young single mothers. It’s like facilitated networking around the types of housing support that they have not received from the local council. Generations of neglect from different councils and public bodies have forced us into these spaces where we only have each other to turn to; we only have these mutual aid networks to reach for, in a very serious and non-radical way. This is the desperation of hope. You know, this is the only thing that we're able to do at this point.

But there's certainly something beautiful in this kind of gathering with intent, as is happening around me. The offshoots of that are visible in the young children playing around me, and people who pop their heads in to see what's going on: there's a conviviality, even in these most desperate times. In our practice, we work around acknowledging, reinforcing and just facilitating that. The built environment is the canvas on which we're trying to do those things. That's the texture of the argument at the moment: whether it's in Angell Town or Ramallah, it's that texture which I think really fills the picture for us.

KOOZ Catherine, your research investigates how democratic infrastructures enable democratic coexistence in the face of post truth polarisation and neoliberal depoliticisation. How has this agenda shaped your curatorial approach to this edition of IABR — and particularly the public programme?

CK So this kind of the texture that Akil is describing or bringing out, these locations and gatherings that can often seem banal — you know, people coming together in community centres, or just gathering informally — all kinds of magic can spring these kinds of everyday places. In Rotterdam, these spaces are the basis for my research on democratic infrastructures, and they've deeply influenced my curatorial approach for Nature of Hope.

I've been working with a community theatre called Rotterdams Wijktheater — literally Rotterdam Neighbourhood Theatre — which has been working in underprivileged neighbourhoods across Rotterdam since the 1990s. They facilitate a process where people who wouldn’t otherwise engage with the theatre can bring their own stories on stage. Groups of people get together in a rehearsal room and, through a lot of improvisation and play, they develop a theatrical production where people perform themselves. I became part of that community theatre in 2018 — first as a student and then as a participant — getting to know a lot of people who started to feel like family.

Meanwhile, I started this PhD in political theory, which was dealing with big questions around post truth polarisations. I started to realise that what I was learning within that community theatre was teaching me much more about democracy and coming together than reading philosophy — however much I loved that too! It led to my understanding of democratic infrastructures as the translations or mediators between these informal modes of living — with so many different kinds of lived experiences — and the way in which we organise on a bigger and more formal level. How do you bring people — people who might organise, gather and articulate themselves in their own voice — into these democratic systems? Very often, that's where a blockage lies: people don't feel heard when they speak in another kind of voice, or when they act in a way that deviates from the expected norm. Through theatre, the diverse stories and experiences that they bring to the stage act not only like a moment of recognition for people who have had similar experiences and never saw themselves represented; it also brings those stories to exactly those places where they have the biggest potential for impact, where they can be heard — at the city council, or the Ministry of Finances, for instance.

All of this is to say that I'm really interested in cultivating those routes for articulation and for creating change; places that bring together experiential knowledge, transforming and translating these into something that can be used to engage a public and start to act politically. I think a lot of architectural workers face a lot of cognitive dissonance in their everyday work, as architecture continues to be very complicit in climate change and other forms of injustice. Many want to work in a different way, but they don't know exactly where to start. So we thought that if a Biennale can bring together all kinds of people and share their practice, can we not also turn it into some kind of infrastructure for hope, into a place where we can channel these voices into something that can start to act politically?

HS Catherine has explained it really well; in terms of the approach that we were taking with the Practice Place, we wanted to allow all of the knowledge, the experience, the other ways of doing, being, existing and practising, to touch the ground in the context of the Netherlands. We recognise that we are speaking to an architectural audience with different capacities and underlining that is the ethos that we're not promising to have the answers. Rather than trying to ideate and invent completely new ways out of the ‘poly-crises’, as has been referenced already, there are actually a lot of people on the supposed periphery of architectural practice — on the periphery of other ways of working, knowing and practising — who are already doing that work. Things can be activated or brought into your own practice, or you can learn from each other in a very sort of practical way.

So for us, it was about bringing people together and then stepping back, almost. By virtue of coming together in this space, they already have a narrative to share. Going back to the question of hope, these practitioners already demonstrate that there already are alternative ways of working that are hopeful. We don't necessarily need to reinvent the wheel. We just need to give the space to people who are already doing that work. So the Practice Place is a way of us being able to, like, really operationalise that and action that; I’m really excited by what's happening already.

KOOZ Akil, I would like to understand a bit more about Resolve’s approach towards systemic thought, and how that translates into creating the infrastructures and connections that you build.

ASI think that all we do is driven towards a type of systemic change. It's important to preface that although we're situated within the traditions of the built environment — my background is in architecture and urban planning — a lot of our wider practice as such, is born from the radical Black movements of the 1981 uprisings in Britain. We really do see ourselves as standing on the shoulders of Pan-Africanist, ‘Third World-ist’ and anti-imperialist traditions. That, I think, is always shaping our mode of systemic thinking.

So we're thinking about how we tell the story of local and localised people differently; how we can facilitate and celebrate the local power that we so often come across through our work. There's also a view to disempowering certain dominant structures; I think that's probably one of the things which is maybe less explicit in terms of the final outcome. For example, exhibitions have to operate within contexts in which they're contained by power. We are still commissioned by institutions; we are still employed by universities. We still work with local authorities delivering events like this one, which is actively criticising that same local authority. But we hold on to disordering and disempowering dominant power structures; those structures that design the way in which we experience our societies — ways in which queer, Black and POC bodies end up at the bottom of the pile. How do our actions join the genealogies of disordering actions? There's a lot of feeling around abolitionist thinking, perhaps even anarchist thinking — certainly for me, and perhaps an interpretation of those concerns across the whole collective.

But then there's always a translation of that, in the way we build. Whenever we do a project — whether it's around policy or advocacy for geopolitical change or whatever — there's always something tangible that comes from it. Actually that's where we find our strength, when we build and create. It's never just about the object: we're doing it in demonstration of the idea of building and creating. So we don't sell the work that goes in galleries; we don’t sell the IP that happens to find its way into institutions. It's the act itself that is demonstrative. It’s demonstrative of something larger, of this kind of system thinking; we use this term “thinking through making” to try and capture that idea that we're actually using our hands in many ways, we're trying to create as a means of thinking.

I sometimes hesitate to use the word praxis — it's a word that I'm still trying to explore myself. But this point between systems thinking and systemic intervention, in our view, is not necessarily motivated by the idea of providing bridges to and from communities. Actually these days, I think we're more interested in a bottom-down approach, in what it means to build infrastructure that essentially captures that sentiment. We're talking about building power, exchanging knowledge and consolidating resources between communities — outside of the apparatus of states and institutions, albeit with their resources, albeit even using their methods.

CK I’m reminded of a paper by Eve Tuck and Wayne Yang; one of the things that they state is that there are some kinds of knowledge that the academy doesn't deserve. And I think you could say the same about cultural institutions, right? Within architecture, I feel like we're not often trained to really assess what is around us: what actually is our practice, and where we are in that context. Some of this work also tries to make visible that as practitioners, we are not outside. We're not somewhere abstract, imagining what could be in a distant future. We are already embedded in practice: the way that we work, act and think. What we can or cannot see, or when we are inattentive; what knowledge we expose ourselves to or not: this influences what kind we can design, and who can be heard in that, as well.

HSThere's something to be noted around the context in which we operate as practitioners, understanding the kind of incentives and systems in place that allow you to articulate within that space, to move in one direction or another. Some of my work is in the domain of the built environment, but from a policy angle rather than design. There is a lot of work around translating value across different systems: systems of value, but also operational systems. Speaking to someone who is interested in generating a certain amount of profit — because that's how they sort of measure progress — is about understanding what their value system is and then finding out where there may be parallels or points of convergence.

For example in the UK, we have certain obligations that developers have to meet: they must provide some kind of social benefit in addition to building homes on a particular site, for instance. So that's a really straightforward exchange. We speak to the community to understand what it needs; when developers meet their obligation, the community gets some kind of infrastructure. I could add to the many critiques about this not-particularly-robust system. But the point I'm trying to make is similar to what Catherine and Akil were saying: sometimes, you don't necessarily need to bring everything. Actually, knowing what you can bring and how you can articulate it — again, translating across different value systems, thinking about incentives and how things arrive at a certain place — could actually be a real strength.

CK I'm really curious to hear from you, Keller, also about the ATTTNT project that you're showing in the exhibition.

KE Well, there's too much to say. And I want to link arms in sympathy with all four of you. You are all working on the kinds of practices that want to move beyond the anointed digital, legal, econometric languages — to put forward a spatial language. And that language is a medium for a whole other kind of politics. Black, feminist, abolitionist, anarchists, indigenous thinkers are using a spatial language. Space is the stage. Space is the mixing chamber for another kind of knowledge, another kind of politics, another kind of activism. It’s not so much about making a declaration, but about managing dispositions, about knowing what to do next, about moving forward in an unfolding context. It’s about knowing how, as we were saying before, instead of knowing the answer. None of us are really looking for singular solutions and singular evils—not a singular, comprehensive solution but a world that is, following Anna Tsing, “patchy”. To borrow further from Tsing — as well as the late James C Scott and countless other thinkers — the activism that accompanies this way of thinking derives its political power not from consistency, but from inconsistency, from dissensus, from keeping them guessing.

The ATTTNT project is also looking at a patchy world; it’s looking at a big scar on the United States and trying to make palpable black and indigenous geographies that have been obscured or eclipsed by the last 500 years of colonising, capitalising, globalising. The ATTTNT project is made of a lot of little territories —a lot of different authors and different stories aggregated to create a formation. The project is a planetary line for reparations. While not turning away from the ugliness of this history, it is a thrill to see this parallel world. There's nothing complete about it. It is not part of a world order. It is patchy. It is partial. But it is also planetary.

The project looks at these histories as a road map for reparations, and it presents reparations as white work. How can it be anything but white work? It is not the job of black and indigenous people to wrest the land from white establishment. It is the job of a white establishment to release its criminal hold on those resources.

CK I have a question around this sensitive issue around reparation work — how does that relate to the language of representation and the mapping work that you show within the exhibition?

KE In a dialogue that I had with the researcher Imani Jacqueline Brown, I asked her the same question. She felt it was important to work resourcefully with whatever you could find. I understand that, and I am also trying to use some of these tools (like GIS mapping) in a way that abuses and misuses them. Maybe it is a way of decommissioning the ‘master’s tools.’ You sort of have to get your hands on them in order to bend them, abuse them, decommission them, or put them in a different context.

The map that we're in the process of producing in collaboration with a network of HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) looks very different from the mapping that we're rehearsing with this Biennale or with the Chicago Architecture Biennale last year. But I am still unsettled about it.

KOOZ As architects, representation is one kind of magic we have, but sometimes it's hard to understand exactly what layers need to be there, and how we avoid making an over fetishisation of the tool.

KE All the work you all are talking about Akil, and what Imani does, it ends up being lumpy, you know; it's not just made of one kind of one elementary particle as the common denominator. It ends up being foggy and lumpy, and it's the mixture that is all important.

AS I'm really fascinated by the way that you use words, Keller. There's something really powerful about that patchiness as a way of describing that resonates with the work. That's also the layout: we have this collective tapestry of labours and practices that are all somehow interwoven — but describing them as interwoven makes it sound too neat, right? The neatness of this tapestry isn't actually the way of describing agency today. There's a patchiness in spirit; we interact through interference, in some ways. So whilst I think that there is a steadfastness to working towards liberation and to disorder these systems. I don’t think we would be able to do that without acknowledgement of interference, the messy way in which we react with one another; in which practices begin to come together or not. That type of messiness is inherent in the work.

For me, there are moments — particularly moments of crisis, of these deep, desperate moments, where I find myself in currently — where I wonder if we embraced that messiness too readily, too uncritically, and whether we should have been organising more militantly. At the same time, I know in my heart that I am not that militant organiser. It's a different type of dilemma or constant questioning.

KE I have hope that this kind of super-abundance of knowledge that we're talking about — the knowledge that's been eclipsed — might now flow back in. But of course you sometimes worry about how to displace dominant forms of information and power. There are times where it's hard to have that hope, you know? There are times when you feel as if you're just “whistling through the graveyard,” as we say in the United States.

KOOZ We talked about space being ‘the place’; there really is a strength in people coming together within a particular location. What a place can generate and the kind of actions that it can spark — this is extremely exciting to realise as architects and as communities, isn’t it?

CK Coming back to patchiness and militancy, I think when there's not one language to speak, — when there are all these different ways to come together, and forms of knowledge to share — then there's the possibility of magic, right? Things can happen that you would have never imagined. Of course that kind of patchiness can be complicated to accept. And maybe there's a place for militancy too, as one part of the patchiness. But if you do away with that, then you lose the possibility of magic and of unexpected synergies and deviations from the dominant mode of reasoning. If, as architects, we can be a little bit more open to that, I think we gain a world, you know?

HS It feels like being able to look beyond the parameters of a specific discipline, beyond a sort of ideological purity to the profession. It’s about being able to say, okay, what are we facing here and what are these other people doing elsewhere? We don't have to be architects to be able to share these different ways of practising, being, knowing — not thinking of extraction, but rather of mutual understanding, or thinking about what you know and what is valuable.

I believe there's a real strength in being able to look outside your own practice and engage meaningfully: not just sort of as a tangential or momentary action, but to actually and actively look beyond normative ways of thinking and doing. That brings us back to what we're trying to do in the exhibition but also on an everyday basis, there's a lot of opportunity to circumvent the barriers to progress, towards a more just way of thinking about practice.

KOOZ There are a number of connections and things which are activated when one engages with any kind of space. One needs a mode of thinking which is so much wider, and which is continuously engaging with other disciplines.

CKI want to say one last thing about that… We've been talking about the master's tools. But for this master figure — especially for those who would engage with other forms of practice like writing or teaching — these boundaries of ‘who counts’ as an architect are still so harsh. Even in my life — even during my studies — I’ve been told, ‘Oh, you're not an architect.’ To be an architect, there’s a notion of someone having to take you down in order to build you back up, like a phoenix. This method of teaching is so ingrained within our practice. In order to restructure ourselves, we also need to see that we already know and have a lot. Of course, we need stuff that's not yet there, but as humans — as people who are engaged — there's also a lot that's already there, but that we just fail to recognise as a discipline time and again, when we need it the most.

HS I think we can sometimes fall into this trap of recentering the ideas of the Global North, and this idea that the architect has an obligation to be the ‘master builder’ and so on. But the majority of buildings, for most of human history, have been designed not by architects but by people who have an embodied knowledge of the context. They build it because they know how someone else, wherever they are, has done it in one way — and maybe it's always been that way. Buildings evolve to match the needs and the climate requirements of the context. So in a sense, there is a danger of trying to import that model, of the artist or architect as a universal solution to other contexts.

I think about knowledge and ways of thinking, rather than thinking about the discipline itself. I'm not claiming that I have the answers but it feels like a step in the right direction. And I see that in the work that Akil is doing, in this work Keller is doing, in this idea that we don't necessarily have the answers — but we have a way of thinking about knowledge that allows us to give space for others to come forward.

KOOZ Super. It was incredible speaking to all of you. Thank you so much.

Bios

Catherine Koekoek has a background in architecture and philosophy. She is a PhD candidate in Political Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her dissertation examines how democratic infrastructures – from community centers to the Rotterdams Wijktheater, with which she collaborates – enable democratic coexistence. Together with Veerle Alkemade, Catherine Koekoek produces the feminist architecture podcast Respons.

Hani Salih works as a researcher, designer, writer, editor, and curator. He works across a range of disciplines and practices, from architecture to systems and policy. Hani Salih is interested in the broader contexts in which social and cultural phenomena take place, and is currently exploring this in his work as a lecturer in Architecture and Design, and as a curator of events and debates at De Dépendance in Rotterdam. He is drawn to the built environment’s potential to facilitate and encourage social change on a micro and macro scale and believes that multidisciplinary thinking is the way forward in a complex and interconnected world.

Keller Easterling is Enid Storm Dwyer Professor of Architecture at Yale. Easterling's books include Medium Design (Verso 2021), Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), Subtraction (Sternberg, 2014), Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005), and Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America (MIT, 1999). Easterling is also the co-author (with Richard Prelinger) of Call it Home, a laserdisc/DVD history of US suburbia from 1934-1960. Easterling lectures and exhibits internationally. Her research and writing were included in the 2014 and 2018 Venice Biennales. Easterling is a 2019 United States Artist in Architecture and Design.

RESOLVE is an interdisciplinary design collective that combines architecture, engineering, technology and art to address social challenges. They have delivered numerous projects, workshops, publications, and talks in the UK and across Europe, all of which look toward realising just and equitable visions of change in our built environment. Much of RESOLVE’s work aims to provide platforms for the production of new knowledge and ideas. An integral part of this way of working means designing with and for young people and under-represented groups in society. RESOLVE's project portfolio ranges from architecture/urban design projects to community support work, from artist installations to research publications. They also lead an undergraduate unit at the Architectural Association, were Research Fellows at the Het Niuewe Instituut in 2020, and are Honorary Fellows of the Royal Institute of British Architects.

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. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.