Aikštėje Lukas Jusas, Leta Lileikytė, Justinas Dūdėnas, Andrius Ropolas, Matas Šiupšinskas

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“Part of why I was interested in studying a very toxic, polluted and continuing to be polluted place is that I was interested in thinking of other ways of managing toxic space or our approach to them. Instead of thinking about segregation or separation, thinking about ways to live within them or study ways of living that was much more about remediation and co-existing with other forms of life. That was one of the things that drew me as an architect, occupying one of those spaces of externalities and considering ways to process them.”

Rosa Whiteley is an architectural researcher and designer based in London. Her work investigates how we have organised the world through toxic flows, and how those flows, in turn, organise us. She is interested in how geopolitical conditions jump between the planetary and the molecular, and how forms of alternative infrastructure can influence the management of toxic space. She is currently working as a researcher in collaboration with the artist duo COOKING SECTIONS on projects in the US, UK, Sweden, and Italy. In December 2021, Operaciones Editorial published Rosa’s first book, In the Pink: Lively Architectures of a Toxic Cloud. Rosa’s work has been presented in Belgium, Germany, China, and the UK. Rosa holds a BA (hons) in Architecture from Manchester School of Architecture, and an MA in Architecture from the Royal College of Art, London.

In this podcast, the conversation starts with discussing Rosa’s work “In the Pink”, on the toxic clouds surrounding the town of Nikel, formed as a result of nickel smelting activities in the area. Rosa explored and visualized the flow and resilience of different forms of life in this extractivist and seemingly dead landscape. Plants, bacteria and other forms of life that thrive in toxic environments reappear also in other projects by Rosa, such as “London Oil Critters”. We finish the conversation with the question how toxins’ “metabolic ability to break boundaries between the biological and the synthetic”, their ability to communicate “through our bodies or landscapes” can inform other types of evidencing for accountability.

“It is around an understanding of the value and importance of what we call “felt experience” or “affect architecture”, aspects of space and living in space that cannot necessarily be diagrammed or put into parti drawing, but is essentially the web of immaterial and intangible aspects of what it means to be part of a space that really sort of… hits you in the chest. Overly unresearched topic in architecture! (...) For us, we always talk of the ways the materials can speak to you, which is to say, that we can sense materials. We have an ability to feel them and they have an ability to communicate things to us and for us it is where often the architecture emerges.”

Meng Li and Linda Zhang are founders of Studio Pararaum, an award-winning architecture, design, and art studio based in Zürich and Toronto. They consider their practice to be a provocation of architecture’s capacity to communicate through felt experience—affect as a design process towards lived experience. Their work has been exhibited and presented internationally in Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States, including the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, the Milan Architecture Design Expo, Canadian Centre for Architecture, London Festival of Architecture, Syracuse Erie Canal Museum, Toronto Offsite Design Festival, Berlin Institute for Endotic Research and the Berlin Centre of Art and Urbanistics.

In the Sensing Urban Matter podcast, Linda and Meng take us through their practice that experiments with the intangible aspects of architecture while attentively processing material behaviour and its representations. Their projects, from commemorating cultural history of Erie canal waterway infrastructure, to pinpointing the origin of stones being used in Tessiner square (Zürich, Switzerland) bring questions of memory, representation and contradictions of the nature/artificial binary.

A035. Sensing Urban Matter. Blooms, plumes and flour. Conversation with Nico Alexandroff on landscapes, material flows and environmental data

The first conversation in Sensing Urban Matter brought together two artists - Ivana Králíková and Evelina Šimkutė - to talk about how an off-center urban garden has been key in their artistic practice. Ivana Králíková is a Stockholm-based artist who since 2017 is committed to a long term interdisciplinary research Dig Where You Stand where she uses her background in ceramics and knowledge about soil as an entry point into exploring the natural and cultural processes affecting land use in cities. An offshoot project, Hi Neighbour! investigates earth’s functionality in the local environment of Stockholm’s suburb of Hjulsta, where Ivana carries out her hands-on research from headquarters situated in the local allotment gardens and surrounding area. Since 2015 Evelina Šimkutė is leading Šilainiai Project – creative platform in housing estate of Šilainiai, Kaunas, which focuses on active engagement with the site and local community through a variety of creative processes – collaborative archives, workshops, artist residencies, talks and events. Currently Evelina is focusing on long-term strategies for sustainable city and community in the neigbourhood, coordinating Šilainiai Urban Gardens initiative.

Both Ivana and Evelina met during the urban hike proposed by Ivana in September, 2021 - Dig Where You Stand: Journey into Neoenvironmental Kaunas. Here in this podcast they share their ideas before their live meeting in Kaunas about urban plants and gardens, what does it mean for an artist to be “grounded” and the relation between a garden and a home.

“How do we make invisible things visible? (…) Hyper-locality—you are in one place and at least geographically where you are working and who you are working, participants, target audience, co-creators, however you approach the process—is seen as a negative thing: “You’re hyperlocal, so you are not reaching everyone”. I would seriously invite to try and be part of at least for a day and learn about maybe this different way of working process and think about the value that it brings.”

Sensing Urban Matter podcast series is curated and moderated by Viktorija Šiaulytė. Architektūros fondas' programme Sensing Urban Matter is part of the Future Architecture platform and European Architecture programme 2021, and is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union and a strategic partner Lithuanian Council for Culture.

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