Symposium and exhibition
From Land Grab to Landback is a transdisciplinary symposium and multimedia platform that investigates and offers critical perspectives that tie architecture across different scales to urgent questions about land, territory, property, sovereignty, ecology, and life. In response to planetary-scale calls for social and ecological justice, architecture is called to confront its legacy as the material manifestation of systems of power, occupation, territorialization, extraction, capture, identity, development, and modernity. Drawing from the work, research, and practices of leading activists, designers, planners, artists, political-scientists, anthropologists, scholars, journalists, and philosophers, the symposium provides an intersectional approach to questions about land, and the many struggles that ensue during an era of technological escalation and ecological urgency. Through a series of talks, film screenings, roundtable discussions, and workshops From Landgrab to Land back: architecture and positions on land engages with many temporalities while looking at the past and present of critical questions on land and architecture. The symposium offers a platform for the presentation and dissemination of critical imaginaries operating in the immediate and distant future.
The planetary-scale symposium takes place and is co-organized by the Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Johannesburg, Estudios de la Mujer y Género (Women and Gender Studies) at the Universidad de Puerto Rico-Rio Piedras, the Department of Architecture with support of the Center for Excellence in the Arts and Humanities at Iowa State University, and LOUDREADERS with the support of the Mellon Foundation, re:arc institute, and ACSA Fellowship to Advance Equity in Architecture.
Co-organizing institutions and keynote participants
GSA Johannesburg: Nomalanga Mahlangu, Oratile Mothoagae, Naadira Patel, and Simphiwe Mlambo. Estudios de la Mujer y Género UPR-RP: El Hangar en Santurce, Organización Can (Organización Del Pueblo Indígena Can-Jíbaro Borikua de Boriké), La Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, Rocio Zambrana, Pedro Cardona Roig, Marakiani Olivieri, Alexandra Pagan. ISU: Anthony Warrior, Sikowis Nobiss, Shelley Buffalo/ Great Plains Action Society, Sean Connelly, Dima Srouji, Gabriela Leandro Pereira, Nell Gabiam, Abu Salma Khalil, Doug Spencer, Nadia Huggins, Jason Mena, Killian O’ Dochartaigh & Edward Lawrenson, Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, Luis Othoniel Rosa, Maria Parazo Rose, Oleksiy Radynski, Cruz Garcia & Nathalie Frankowski / WAI Architecture Think Tank.
Exhibition
In his book of poems for the nation X/EX/EXIS, Puerto Rican poet Roque Raquel Salas Rivera writes about queer time and trans memories, about nation and identity, borders and revolutions, colonial and capitalist violence (and how they can be EXchanged one for the other).
The earth is a tree full of poems like mushrooms of the air explores questions at the intersection of land, water, extraction, sovereignty, accumulation, occupation, dispossession, institutionalization, historization, violence, and resistance through material and speculative works across a wide panorama of media, geopolitical, and narrative approaches.
In the form of a spatial spiral temporality, the exhibition transitions and embodies exercises of resistance and provocations, as both, fictions and realities materialize by means of installations, documentaries, activist props, science-fiction plots, and anti-colonial poetry.
The exhibition continues the conversation initiated in The Planetary Wretched and Unpayable Debts (two curatorial projects presented in 2022 and 2023 respectively), to offer a parallel realm to the planetary symposium “From Land Grab to LandBack: Architecture and Positions on Land.”
Positions
The exhibition includes works by Dima Srouji, Samiha Meem, Nadia Huggins, Jason Mena, Killian O’ Dochartaigh & Edward Lawrenson, Sikowis Nobiss, Moselle Singh, Lance Foster, and Sunrose IronShell / Great Plains Action Society, Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, Jason Fitzroy Jeffers, Pete Goche, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera, Post-Novis / Hilary Wiese, Rose Florian, Christopher Rey Perez, Luis Othoniel Rosa, Ophelia S. Chan, Claire Alexandre, Holly Craig, Coco Allred, and WAI Think Tank.
