Radical entanglements: Architectures, Societies, Environments, Politics/

‘Radical Entanglements’ acknowledges architecture and architectural practice as fundamentally entangled with the world, affective and affected. We are entangled, with each other, with our environments, architectures, other species, infrastructures, technologies, politics and more, in ways that are increasingly threatening our own conditions of existence. Despite this significance, these entanglements are not understood or explored in-depth as yet. The necessity for systemic change appears to be obvious, but how to enact transformations that are sufficiently radical is still unclear.

This conference explores diverse forms of practices, processes and modes across and within architecture through its heterogenous entanglements. At its core sustainability is about entanglements: of different actors, different entities, different scales, different timeframes, as well as the long-term affects of actions that result from them. We aim to draw out how these entanglements frame specific problems, exchange impacts and create potential solutions. The conference seeks to overcome reductionist explanation models, and a mode of thinking that rests on separately layered realities (e.g. the technical, the social, the material). Instead, it welcomes and encompasses the idea of heterogeneous characters and relational associations co-shaping each other. Whilst many approaches from systems theories to assemblage approaches have tried to explain and characterise these interdependencies, there have been few multimodal and multidisciplinary approaches towards sustainability developed through and for architecture.

How can we discover, devise and create (additional) entanglements for and through architecture that are going to the roots or fundaments of our contemporary situation, thus enabling radical new forms of practices for sustainability? With radical entanglements the conference aims to develop new forms of knowledge and actions, through different sets of relationships, including though not limited to acts, processes, moments or practices of caring, imagining, acting or navigating. What entanglements are useful to move beyond the status quo, that challenge dominant paradigms, that offer new perspectives into practices for sustainability?
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