Contact Zones: Architectural Encounters in the Post-Anthropocene

Contact can be an intimate affair, a source of friction, resulting in collisions or in new forms of cohesion and mutual understanding. Considered within a zone, contact is framed within a spatial context, producing not only a conceptual but also a physical effect. According to Marisol de la Cadena and Arturo Escobar, pluriversal contact zones are zones of encounter, sites of divergent and overlapping interpretations of material bodies that seek to coexist in a time of ecological destruction.

Contact Zones: Architectural Encounters in the Post-Anthropocene

Dimensions 11, Journal of Architectural Knowlege

Issue Editors: Lidia Gasperoni (University College London), Beata Hemer (Royal Danish Academy), Jennifer Raum (Bauhaus-University Weimar), Guro Sollid (Royal Danish Academy)

The climate emergency requires enormous reductions in CO² emissions, resource consumption and waste generated by construction, and creates conceptual and methodological challenges for the design of just environments. These challenges go beyond the question of how to equip architecture with more sustainable techniques and materials that nonetheless reproduce the same distances and dichotomies between nature and culture, matter and form.

Recently, the Post-Anthropocene has opened up a discourse that focuses on more-than-human ways of knowing, critical spatial practices, and the long-term effects of architecture on the environment – a discourse that radically expands the possibilities for spaces of proximity and contact.

Focussing on the processes, methodologies and insights of architectural practice on all scales, contact zones can allow for a rethinking of more-than-human relationships, address material issues of inequality, lack of responsibility or material breakdown from a new angle, or even offer a zone of resistance, of cohesion or solidarity. Contact zones can be thought of as material and spatial configurations, following the implications of both contact and zone. While also inviting other interpretations, this dual reading is offered here as a possibility of approaching this call:

Contact is mediated through matter and across bodies, allowing us to explore the sensory and material affects and effects of an encounter. Contact is a reciprocal event, suggesting that it involves ›touching‹ and ›being touched‹. With its specific temporalities and transformative processes over time, materialities influence the way we inhabit it. This implies a rethinking of the material and spatial dimensions of landscapes and the built environment that allows for non-anthropocentric relationships: How do material breakdowns and decay open up contact zones, for example through acts of repair?

Zones are understood as spaces that are constantly meditated and negotiated in encounters across differences. Using anthropologist Anna Tsing’s concept of friction, we can understand a contact across difference as a transformative space, an arena for the production of new agendas – and thus as an inherently political space. Navigating such spaces forces us to foreground the social and activist qualities of an architectural practice. At a time of changing climates, we can work architecturally with this transformative potential of conflict – the frictions mentioned above. Reflecting on activist space-making, for example, what are the methodologies for establishing contact zones as zones of resistance and solidarity? What spatial implications does such a zone have?

This call offers four main focus-areas for responses (which may be merged and combined):

1. Perspectives as the discursive frameworks and premises for engaging with contact zones in architecture. How is it possible to reveal their transformative function? How can we talk about embodied contact between human and non-human matter, and what language do we need to generate non-anthropocentric knowledge beyond anthropocentric abstractions and physically distant concepts?
2. Methodologies emerging in the context of designing contact zones. How do zones of contact manifest themselves, and is it possible to establish methodological frameworks for making them accessible? How can we rethink our (human) relationship with matter through non-anthropocentric methodologies?
3. Media practices that allow us to sense contact zones. Is an embodied perception of contact zones without media possible? What are the ethical and aesthetic considerations when mediating landscapes and built environments of contact zones?
4. Pedagogies considering contact zones as a particular space of learning. What kinds of pedagogies can foster non-anthropocentric ways of learning and knowing? What spatial configurations would support such a space of learning?

In the context of Dimensions as a journal of and for architectural knowledge, we want to explore the commonalities of our environment and its inherent potential for contact, exchange, and collaboration, as well as to investigate human/non-human agency and the proximity and reciprocity of different agents. Marisol de la Cadena and Arturo Escobar’s intention was to contribute to ›a world of many worlds‹. Following this line of thought, we wish to foster a dialogue across disciplines, proposing even more worlds beyond existing modes of anthropocentric knowledge production in architecture.

Our aim is to embrace a hybridity and transdisciplinarity that undermines presumptions of architectural purity and rigour by expanding previous notions of contact. Similarly, we recognise the hybridity within the field of spatial practices; that most of us have multiple roles and identities, where perceived boundaries between research, teaching and practice are often illusory. We look forward to contributions that acknowledge this and work across methods and formats.

This issue is intended as a collaborative format. While we welcome individual voices, we will prioritise multi-authored contributions, medial explorations of the relationship between human and non-human bodies, dialogues between authors previously separated (whether by disciplinary boundaries, time, language, geography, etc.), practice based research and research by/through design approaches, visual contributions such as maps, diagrams, or comics, or other formats dedicated to the physical space of the lifeworld that create hitherto unexplored architectural contact zones in the Post-Anthropocene.

Schedule:

Meeting with possible Contributors End of September, 20204

Deadline for Submissions January 15, 2025

Notification for Peer-Review February 1, 2025

Peer-Review Period February - March 2025

Revision Period March - April 2025

Rebound Peer-Review May 2025

Editorial Feedback and Approval May - August 2025

Publication January 2026

For further information, please visit https://www.dimensions-journal.eu/#/curated-editions/contact-zones

We will be organising a meeting with potential contributors at the end of September to get to know each other. If you are interested, please contact Jennifer Raum (jennifer.raum@uni-weimar.de).