Columbia GSAPP announces the launch of AFFIRMATIONS: an eight-month series of discussions with designers, researchers, planners, preservationists, and activists to affirm and interrogate how to think and redesign the built environment at the intersection of climate, ecological, societal, bodily, and technological crises and defiance.
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.
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 will be hosted in person at Columbia GSAPP and streamed online. Together with the GSAPP community, respondents from around the world - the AFFIRMATIONS cohort - will be able to respond to the sessions.
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.
GSAPP will hold five AFFIRMATIONS during the Fall:
Dates and the full list of speakers for the five Spring AFFIRMATIONS will be announced in early Fall 2023. More information can be found here.
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 GSAPP.
