non-typological architecture
based on a painting by Francisco J Mendizábal, Cerro Rico and Villa Imperial de Potosí, with reservoirs supplying water to mining operations, c 1755–75.
Architecture Beyond Extractivism: Syncretism as a Method
Brendon Carlin, James Kwang Ho Chung, Federico Campagna
In the Papuan rainforest, Africa’s Sahel desert, the Hawizeh marshes of Iran, or the high Andes mountains, there still exists a diverse ‘archipelago’ of architectures, practices, and techniques for losing, recovering, and reinventing the world. As their land, bodies, forms of life, knowledge, and techniques for world-building—including the participation of non-human kin, stars, rivers, and the living, dead, and unborn—began to be attacked and dispossessed, Indigenous peoples have emerged as pre-eminent ontological ‘master-architects.’ Central to these techniques is syncretism: a method for blending, hybridising, or ingeniously nesting their divinities, knowledge, and practices within those of monotheistic and European socioeconomic systems.
Recently, due to mounting crises and dispossessed peoples entering state political institutions, radically different ways of seeing, being, and ‘building’ have begun to destabilise exploitation and extractivism’s monopoly on reality, underpinned by the fiction of property and a knowable, universal ‘nature’ separate from culture. For instance, since the early 21st century in Ecuador, New Zealand, and Canada, ‘earth-beings’ like mountains or water bodies have emerged as sentient political actors to be protected and cared for, with legal rights to their reproduction and happiness. Here, syncretism diverges from within and against the incessant, homogenising urbanisation that is threatening so many with extinction.
Yet syncretism is a permanent feature of history; Europe was once an enigmatic constellation of colliding and blending practices and realities. Its history shows no stable, universal truth or reality, and no ideal way of thinking, relating, or living. This year, we invite you to unpack the instruments of the dominant fiction. How can architecture provide techniques to lose the world, inhabit multiple worlds, and create new ones? Often, this involves learning from and taking the side of those who are fighting dispossession, caring for and protecting kin, and thus already living and building otherwise.
