A lab for uncertainties and urban assemblies, a bridge between post-human politics and an ecology without nature
Between 2010 and 2012 several workshops were given on the reticular materiality of buildings, a reflection centered on the collective of architects and urbanists. A detailed description of an edificial event gives us as a result a multitude of back and forth roads, a heterogeneous network of relationships that make it possible. In some ways a project is the opposite of an event: in a project the trajectory of the processes that constitute it proceeds from the past to the future and any deviation is considered an accident, while an event is by definition contingent, incalculable in its causes and effects. An “edificial event” is perhaps an ambiguous intermediate between both temporal or logic modes. This network that is the edilice is not one of things that relate directly with each other, it is rather one of crossings, crashes and mixtures of flows in which the “technologic” and the “natural” cannot be divided a priori. At this point the architectonic reflection is a possible bridge between post-human politics and an “ecology without nature”.
These workshops were realized in the context of the LIEU, the Uncertainties and Urban Assembly Lab, project that began from the association of the Teddy Cruz study with m7red. Its goals were to research, cartograph and work in association with stakeholders inside hot ecopolitical issues, configuring a conceptual affinity network and an interchange of tools and experiences between stakeholders from different scenarios, creating public documentation and promoting the amplification and composition of voices. Part of this research was an ethnographic fieldwork undertaken with professional architecture producers. 
The lab was an independent work group with chapters in Buenos Aires, Argentina and San Diego, California. It was hosted by the Artistic Investigations Center (CIA) and provided content for the Inclusive Urbanism Master’s Degree from the Parsons School of Design. The lab counted with a cartographical production of controversies and urban assemblies, as with various devices for the amplification and translation of the involved actors’ voices.
Credits:
- Workshop: “Architecture Course: Tendency exploration and conceptual tools”. Part of the course programme in the Artistic Investigations Center (CIA), Buenos Aires, Argentina, March 2010.
- Research and workshop: “Monitoring Particles and populations”. Shanghai Transit Labor Research Platform, coordinated by Anja Kanngieser, Ned Rossiter, and Soenke Zehle. Goethe Institute Shanghai, Shanghai, China, July 2010.
- Seminar: “How to assemble an urban ecology? Infrastructural violence, technical democracy, ecosystemic emergencies”. Artistic Investigations Center, Buenos Aires, Argentina, September 2010.
- Workshop: “Architectural probings in public spaces”, in collaboration with Raumlabor Berlin and Goethe Institut for THE KNOT, mobile platform for artistic production and presentation. Bucharest, Romania, October 2010.
- Workshop: “Uncertainties and Urban Assembly Lab”. Part of the course programme in the Artistic Investigations Center (CIA), Buenos Aires, Argentina, April 2011.
- Workshop: “What is a building? Deconstruction and reassembly”. Dictated in Aisenson Studio, Buenos Aires, Argentina, May 2011.
- Workshop: “Edilicial ecology. How to compose a building”. Dictated in the Julio Keselman Architecture and Design Museum, Buenos Aires, Argentina, September 2011.
- Course: “Fortune and Virtue: imaginary scenarios for architecture. The next 10 years”. February 27th and March 5th, 12th and 19th, Buenos Aires, Argentina.