AFFIRMATIONS Cohort, Subjects, and Events
Text and image from “AFFIRMATIONS,” Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation: https://www.arch.columbia.edu/affirmations
Dr. Antonio Petrov, Founder of the Urban Future Lab (UFL) and Associate Professor in the UTSA Klesse College of Engineering and Integrated Design, has been selected by the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP) as a Respondent for the AFFIRMATIONS cohort. The eight-month series of discussions with designers, researchers, planners, preservationists, and activists affirms and interrogates how to think and redesign the built environment at the intersection of climate, ecological, societal, bodily, and technological crises and defiance.
The Cohort of Respondents from across the world was selected from an open call for researchers, activists, students, practitioners, and educators. This cohort will play a key role in shaping the discussions around each AFFIRMATION, as they attend all sessions online, providing comments and asking questions based on each session’s associated readings. Structured through ten conversations among speakers affiliated with a broad spectrum of geographies and organizations, the series intends to reflect pluralism, heterogeneity, and dissent. Organized as interdisciplinary summits, they are hosted in person at Columbia University GSAPP and streamed online.
As a project convened to practice the reworlding of societies and ecosystems now, AFFIRMATIONS is intended to align evidence and aspirations. It will summarize and state underrepresented histories and possible futures that emerge from the cracks in the structures of power built on the interdependency of carbonization, extractivism, colonization, racialization, anthropocentrism, inequality, patriarchy, and technocracy.
AFFIRMATIONS will include the participation of GSAPP faculty as well as numerous guests: Vicki Been, James Bridle, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, T.J. Demos, Keller Easterling, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Jack Halberstam, Christopher Hawthorne, Samia Henni, Sandi Hilal, Olalekan Jeyifous, Mireia Luzárraga, Rob Nixon, Fuminori Nousaku, Alessandro Petti, Elizabeth Povinelli, C. Riley Snorton, Paulo Tavares, Mio Tsuneyama, Albena Yaneva, Eyal Weizman, David Wengrow, and others.
AFFIRMATIONS is curated by Andrés Jaque, Dean, and Bart-Jan Polman, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programming and Curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, Columbia University GSAPP.
AFFIRMATIONS Schedule
Monday, September 11
AFFIRMATION 1. Anchored Futurisms.
T.J. Demos (UC Santa Cruz)
Olalekan Jeyifous
In-person Response by Felicity Scott
Monday, September 18
AFFIRMATION 2. Material Ecologies.
Mireia Luzárraga (TAKK)
Fuminori Nousaku (Fuminori Nousaku Architects)
Mio Tsuneyama (studio mnm)
In-person Responses by Albena Yaneva and Jorge Otero-Pailos
Monday, October 2
AFFIRMATION 3. Design Policy.
Vicki Been (NYU)
Christopher Hawthorne (Yale)
In-person Responses by Adam Lubinsky and Weiping Wu
Monday, October 9
AFFIRMATION 4. Indigenous Worldings.
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui
Paulo Tavares
In-person Response by Emanuel Admassu
Monday, November 20
AFFIRMATION 5. Decolonizations.
Decolonizing Art Architecture Research (Alessandro Petti; Sandi Hilal)
Denise Ferreira da Silva (University of British Columbia)
In-person Responses by Ateya Khorakiwala and Hiba Bou Akar
Monday, January 22
AFFIRMATION. Climate Regimes.
Samia Henni (Cornell) Rob Nixon (Princeton)
In-person Responses by Keller Easterling and Reinhold Martin
Monday, February 12
AFFIRMATION. Societal Accountabilities.
Eyal Weizman (Forensic Architecture)
David Wengrow (University College London)
In-person Responses by Zoë Crossland and Laura Kurgan
Wednesday, April 3
AFFIRMATION. Queer/Trans Eco-Territorial-Bodiments.
Jack Halberstam
Paul B. Preciado
C. Riley Snorton
In-person Response by Andrés Jaque
Being part of the AFFIRMATIONS cohort is important to us because we discovered synergies between the project and our work at the Urban Future Lab (UFL), particularly in relation to who we are, what our values are, and our aspirations to reshape conversations somewhere between global and hyperlocal scales. The present and its challenges hold us accountable, and this is where our work at the UFL comes to life, in a space between service and teaching, (applied) research and praxis, (engaged) scholarship and collective knowledge. In Eastern philosophy, “reality” implies an unmodified experience of the present moment “as is” without superimpositions, mental constructions, or political, commercial, and disciplinary conditioning. The current moment finds us in a liminal space, which, perhaps, Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore would describe as a place “we read wrong and say that it deceives us.” The call for Affirmations is a call for action that not only aims to speak truth into the void, but also speak into the silence historical and ahistorical narratives have left us with, breaking the common scripts beyond anachronistic cycles and narratives that “fit the future to imaginaries of the future.” I see this as an invitation to enter this field of uncomfortable truth, discrepancies, and entanglements, unearthing unfulfilled potentials that determine an intersectional space, remembering us into the future. Poet Bobby LeFebre inspires my purpose to be a messenger of time that give new meaning to the harmful cultural, economic, commercial, and political instrumentalizations, and if necessary, speak the truth and as a result “never be invited back.”1
1 “They invite me to a thing where the men in suits all look the same, and they twirl and clink wine glasses as the cheese sits next to the olives on plates too small to fill anything but image––everyone is secretly starving, and they laugh at each other’s jokes even though they are not funny, they talk about golf and last quarter’s returns, and the ask me to read something that is joyful and festive and celebratory, something inspiring that will make people feel good about gather, but 50 migrants just died in a truck at the border, and the Supreme Court is an active shooter, and the police filled another black man with 60 holes, and I am not a topical poet, but the elders have taught us that the job of an artist is to reflect the times, so I get on that stage and I do what I do the only way I know how, and when I am done, someone tells me the position of Poet Laureate is supposed to be apolitical, and I say, “maybe it is, but I am not,” and sometimes, the only things better that a standing ovation is a room full of silence. A mentor once told me that sometimes your job as an artist is to be invited somewhere and ensure they never invite you back.” Bobby LeFebre
My entire life I have been an immigrant (and stranger) never living in a country where my native language was spoken, not even in my own country. My multi-disciplinary backgrounds in art, architecture, engineering, urban and cultural studies; multi-cultural upbringing in Macedonia, Germany, France, Spain, and Turkey have shaped me as a culture bearer and a mason of reimaging. Yet without apologizing, I resist the temptations of being a “multihyphenate” or worry about relevance (or popularity), but I follow my conscious and how to serve the public sphere, intellectual, and material culture. I see myself as a choreographer, storyteller, meaning maker, communal visionary, dreamer and a realist at the same time. It’s a “no-box” approach (as to being an “outside-the-box person) in which I strive to raise the consciousness of the collective psyche, celebrate (where there is joy), heal where we hurt, disrupt when faced with indifference, share, making space at every table collectively overcoming stagnation in our fight for inclusivity and (environmental) justice. I do not come from a position of dissent, rather, I serve as an activator. Within institutional frameworks––currently as an Associate Professor at the University of Texas San Antonio––discursive environments––as one of the founding editors of the Harvard GSD journal New Geographies and the Southeastern European magazine DOMA––collective space––serving regions, cities, and communities (in South Texas, North Mexico, and the borderlands) as the founder and director of the Urban Future Lab think and do tank––or within the realm of international policy––and as a member of Global Diplomacy Lab and BMW Responsible Leaders Network––exploring more inclusive forms of (global) diplomacy that empower peacebuilding and a global conscious amongst diplomats and policy makers––my goal is to find balance that shifts our primary obsession from “progress” to “growth”, from “vision” to “connection”, and from “imaginaries” to “inclusion”, enlarging our field of vision to capture a greater range of reality that not only contextualizes the human experience, but makes us cultural translators, raising awareness for the collective human conscious.
—Antonio Petrov
Sources
Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation: “AFFIRMATIONS”, 2023, via https://www.arch.columbia.edu/affirmations