Editorial

Phantasma is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and “Endgültige Form wird von der Architektin am Bau bestimmt.” (“The final form will be defined by the architect on site.”), the Swiss Pavilion at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Elena Chiavi, Kathrin Füglister, Amy Perkins, Axelle Stiefel, and Myriam Uzor. It features contributions by Annemarie Bucher, Rike Felka, Rahel Hartmann Schweizer, Khensani Jurczok-de Klerk, Kate Lacey, and Emma McCormick Goodhart.

What compels us to gather if not the insistence of contact? Gathering is not incidental. It answers a somatic memory: the press of bodies in space, the friction of being near, the murmur of voices overlapping in imperfect harmony. To gather is to think with the body, where imagination and memory converge materially. It is a practice of vulnerability—affective, irreducible to information or abstract affiliation. In coming together, we do not merely assemble; we expose ourselves to the risk and necessity of relation.

In a world structured by networks, connectivity threatens to replace contact. Connectivity promises exchange without encounter, transmission without friction, efficiency without presence. Contact demands something harder: the risk of misalignment, the messy labor of staying with trouble, of being implicated in the complexities of relation. Contact is not seamless, but textured; marked by negotiation, misunderstanding, and mutual transformation.

This distinction draws us to think differently about the spaces we inhabit. Just as gender is constituted through repeated, performative acts rather than inherent traits, so too is space not a neutral container but an active production. Space is made and remade through collective performance. In this light, the very act of gathering becomes an architectural gesture: a materialization of social relations, where each encounter cites the memory of previous encounters, and every space carries the sediment of its past uses.

The repeated practice of gathering creates rhythm; rhythm, in turn, induces flow. Flow is not just movement, but the condition for sociality—for the weaving together of lives through shared time and space. When communication is reduced to information, stripped of its embodied, rhythmic dimensions, something essential is lost. Flow gives way to fragmentation; sociality gives way to transaction. To listen for these rhythms is to reclaim time itself from the machinery of disconnection.

In an age that conflates connection with contact, and information with communication, these shifts affect our understanding of intelligence, subtly distorting its meaning. Once entangled with interpretation and discernment, intelligence is now reduced to speed, efficiency, and extractive output—measurable and performative, detached from reflection, attention, and relational engagement. How can we resist both the commodification of intelligence and the distraction of nostalgia—two strategies of avoidance that emerge in response to the struggle of contact and the difficulty of cohabitation? To do so, we must return to a fundamental question: what does intelligence have to do with understanding—understood not as extraction, but as the act of reading between, discerning relation, and engaging with the world in its full messiness? How might we recover forms of knowing grounded in rhythm, flow, and the labor of presence? What forms of imagination might allow us to think otherwise, in rhythm with the world rather than in abstraction from it?

Hannah Arendt helps us further distinguish intelligence from thought: intelligence solves problems, while thought expands them, making room for plurality and what Arendt calls “the web of human relationships” that continuously shape us.1 This is not intelligence as mastery, but as phantasma—what Jean-Baptiste Brenet, channeling Averroes, identifies as the necessary interface between thought and materiality.2 For Averroes, phantasma are not merely images, but material residues of sensory experience, embedded in the imagination, without which no act of intellection is possible. Thinking is never pure abstraction: it demands the mediation of embodied traces, the sedimented memory of perception. Phantasma thus names the condition of situated thought—the insistence that ideas emerge not ex nihilo but through continuous entanglement with the world. To think, then, is not to isolate, but to project: to activate the speculative relation between mind and material, where modernity’s fractures might be reimagined.

Feminist critique has long challenged the myth of scientific objectivity, exposing its partiality while foregrounding the situatedness of knowledge and expanding what counts as objective.3 Interdisciplinary approaches have taken up this task as well, hybridizing epistemologies and unsettling disciplinary boundaries. Susan Leigh Star’s notion of “boundary objects”—those flexible, translatable entities that allow divergent worlds to cohere—offers one method for world-building across dissonance.4 Sonic practices offer another: not harmony as uniformity, but resonance as negotiation—a way of listening through static, of composing relation across difference. Rhythm, flow, resonance, attunement: these are not just metaphors, but modalities of sense-making, tools for assembling sociality through affective, embodied alignment.

This is the work of phantasma: not to resolve, but to relate. Not to declare intelligence, but to practice it—as expanded thought, as collective listening, as the labor of making contact where connectivity falls short. It isn’t problem-solving, but problem-composing; a fragile assembly of forces that coalesce into a provisional form. A gathering, not to harmonize, but to politicize.