Survivance - e-flux

Editors Nick Axel, Natchee Blu Barnd, Black Quantum Futurism, Lindsay Bremner, Nikolaus Hirsch, Lesley Lokko, Amba J. Sepie, Troy Conrad Therrien

Contributors Thandi Loewenson, Betty Yu, Hock e Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds, Cushla Dares, Kaya Barry, Samid Suliman, Lesley Lokko, Ainslee Alem Robson, Michelle Westerlaken, Mique’l Dangeli, and more…

At face value, the term “survivance” invokes, but suggests something more than mere survival or subsistence. Deconstructed, sur-vivance divulges a bursting forth of life. Sur: above and beyond, rhyming in intent with hyper, meta, super. Vivance: the French take on the Latin root for vitality, vigor, and vivaciousness. Thus, survivance: hyper vitality, super vigor. Surviving as thriving. Thriving as surviving.

Survivance is a collaboration between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and e-flux Architecture.

View Grid

View List

38 essays

Applications Invited: Transdisciplinary Scholars to Re-Design Higher Education

Lesley Green

Applications Invited: Transdisciplinary Scholar to Assist in Re-Designing Higher Education. Project Tasks: Whose knowledge? What is knowledge? What…

The Gift of Food

Sarover Zaidi

The movement that began from our fields Has travelled well beyond our fields, Your nefarious game stands exposed, This people’s movement will not…

Eating the Sun

Alice McSherry, Paul Moss, and Amba J. Sepie

And the dandelion does not stop growing, because it is told it is a weed. The dandelion does not care what others see. It says, “One day, they�…

Everyone Experiments in (The Invisible) College

Gordon White

My little Tasmanian farm sits at 43° south. At this latitude, we are closer to Antarctica than we are to the top of Australia. The southerlies that c…

The Perils of Climate Activism

Nityanand Jayaraman

As I began writing this essay, an opinion piece titled “A Giant Poor Sighted Bird Stands in the Way of India’s Green Goals” from Bloomberg Green…

A Justice-Advancing Architecture Tour

Hawai‘i Non-Linear

Illuminating the overlooked history of so-called twentieth-century architecture in Hawai‘i, this special preview of A Justice-Advancing Architecture…

Acts of Keeping

Gloria Pavita

Lubumbashi, a market Seforah is sent by her mother to Marche Kenya1 to purchase sombe2 and ngai ngai3 seeds along with bitoyo4 and kabambale.5 Tant…

Editorial—“Resisting Nostalgia”

Rasheedah Phillips

The word nostalgia derives from a sickness of home, from the trauma and longing one feels after being artificially and involuntarily ripped from your …

Architecture Without Measure: Notes on Legibility

Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood

Those of us subject to and subjected to the most brutal of human degradations have had to cultivate modes of being, other kinds of living, so that n…

Listening to Stone Beings

Carl Austin Hyatt

In the mid-1980s, I was looking for a place to live and photograph.1 A place to lean into, to know in an intimate way. For years, I had been inspired …

The Other Side of Ecocide

Vishwas Satgar

Unleashing Ecocide The paradox of Western supremacy is that it begins with its own. Its practices of dispossession, barbarism, violence, and imperi…

Transformative Study: A Syllabus

Adjoa Armah

I’ve been still too long and my memory of home sustains me. But my memory of home is fuzzy and I need you to remember with me. I’ve been told my…

A Pact with One’s Own

Joar Nango and Axel Wieder

Axel Wieder You have recently participated in a series of online discussions on indigenous or more specifically Sámi art and architectural practice, …

Editorial—“The Wildness in our Bones”

Amba J. Sepie

This feels like an in-between moment—something tricky to be present to, as if we are caught between a contested and violent past and a not-yet that …

Too Much Reality

Maria Chávez

The artist Julia Norton recently described a unique form of epilepsy that she has been managing, one that took her years to get diagnosed due to the a…

Cultivating, Havening

Bailey Peryman and Kelly Dombroski

Cultivate Christchurch, the Aotearoa New Zealand based urban farm and youth wellbeing project, has inspired people all over the world with its grounde…

Coconut Diaries

Mae-ling Lokko

Within the last decade, fueled by global marketing campaigns and health trends, the coconut and its primary derivatives—oil, butter, milk, sugar, wa…

Siren Songs

Caroline A. Jones

Hearing the buzz We humans evolved to survive in a world with specific types of matter and energy; our particular hominid ancestors thrived by favo…

Wet-on-Wet

Jenna Sutela and Markus J. Buehler

The video Wet-on-Wet (2021) by Jenna Sutela and Markus J. Buehler will be available to watch here on e-flux Architecture for the duration of Surviva…

Editorial—“Weathering, Weathermaking”

Lindsay Bremner

They said with wonder and admiration, you are still alive, like hydrogen, like oxygen. —Dionne Brand1 In Christina Sharpe’s book In the Wa…

Four Lessons on Land, Space, and Resistance

Erin Moore

1. Pinch Points I write from the watery, mountainous Pacific Northwest of North America. This is the bioregion that pulses between the tar sands, t…

Project: Time Capsule

Black Quantum Futurism

The Macon Housing Authority says they may have found a time capsule buried in the ground. The CEO of the authority, June Parker, says they discovere…

Taxonomies of Belonging

Willem Larsen

Dominions of Mythologies All of us caught in the hurricane of the modern world are refugees from our bodies and our senses. It’s the natural animal…

Unconfessed Architectures

Huda Tayob

Gender-based violence in South Africa is often referred to as a silent pandemic, yet one that is widely known. In the first five days of the national …

Mine as Paradigm

Kathryn Yusoff

Dig. Geology and its kin network of extraction, natural resources, architectures of geomorphic transformation (dams, river straightening, climate chan…

Editorial—“Permissions are Not Forthcoming”

Natchee Blu Barnd

Survive. Exist. Strategize. Close. Endure. Hide. Reveal. Persist. Hope. Thrive. Plan. Create. Mobilize. Open. Propel. Writing and speaking about survi…

Building the Ark

Tyson Yunkaporta

Midway through my life, I wake to find myself in a techno-dystopia, with no sense of where my proper pathway has gone. I have a muse, but no mentor to…

Love Space, or, How to Recognize Blackgirl Spatialities

Loren S. Cahill

Blackgirls young and old are memory keepers, cultural workers, love pillars, freedom mappers, and actors.1 Radical love is a regular praxis through wh…

Pandemic Potlatching on the Highway of Tears

Mique’l Dangeli

Sigidm hanaa’na̱x, Smgyigyit, Łagyigyet, ada txa’nii gyeda galts’ap. Sm Łoodm ‘Nüüsm di waayu. Mootgm Goot di nooyu. La̱xsgyiik di p…

The Telltale Worlds of the Octopus

Michelle Westerlaken

As mostly solitary animals, octopuses tend to avoid humans. They spend their time in the depths of the sea in places we cannot easily visit. They are …

Imaginary Nostalgias

Ainslee Alem Robson

Having spent most of my life between cultural dissonance and cultural isolation, double consciousness has always been a part of my daily reality. Stru…

Editorial—“The Long Short”

Lesley Lokko

The South African Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer once wrote that “[to write a short story] is to express from a situation in the exterior or interio…

A tour around the mudflats

Kaya Barry and Samid Suliman

Welcome to the shores of Moreton Bay, just to the east of the sunny, sub-tropical city of Brisbane (or Meanjin, in the language of the Turrbal people)…

The house that Tūhoe built

Cushla Dares

In the small north island township of Tāneatua stands Aotearoa New Zealand’s first living building. This building, known as Te Kura Whare, is locat…

Our Red Nations Were Always Green

Hock e Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds

My 7’ x 30’ forty-eight-piece mono print installations exist in two combined forms: a set of twenty-four primary prints accompanied by a set of tw…

Acts of Remembering

Betty Yu

While generational resilience and resistance in the United States has been in my blood for four generations, like most immigrant families, my family n…

To get lost in mysterious mist

Thandi Loewenson

There is flame, there is light. The flame scorches my pages, light illuminates and brightens them. When I write with the flame, it is because somethi…

Editorial—“Survivance”

Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, and Troy Conrad Therrien

Survivance is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, with guest editors Natchee Blu Barnd, Black Quantum Fu…

Subject

Decolonization, Blackness, Human - Nonhuman Relations

Survivance is a collaboration between the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and e-flux Architecture.

Contributors

Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, and Troy Conrad Therrien Editorial—“Survivance”
Thandi Loewenson To get lost in mysterious mist
Betty Yu Acts of Remembering
Hock e Aye Vi Edgar Heap of Birds Our Red Nations Were Always Green
Cushla Dares The house that Tūhoe built
Kaya Barry and Samid Suliman A tour around the mudflats
Lesley Lokko Editorial—“The Long Short”
Ainslee Alem Robson Imaginary Nostalgias
Michelle Westerlaken The Telltale Worlds of the Octopus
Mique’l Dangeli Pandemic Potlatching on the Highway of Tears
Loren S. Cahill Love Space, or, How to Recognize Blackgirl Spatialities
Tyson Yunkaporta Building the Ark
Natchee Blu Barnd Editorial—“Permissions are Not Forthcoming”
Kathryn Yusoff Mine as Paradigm
Huda Tayob Unconfessed Architectures
Willem Larsen Taxonomies of Belonging
Black Quantum Futurism Project: Time Capsule
Erin Moore Four Lessons on Land, Space, and Resistance
Lindsay Bremner Editorial—“Weathering, Weathermaking”
Jenna Sutela and Markus J. Buehler Wet-on-Wet
Caroline A. Jones Siren Songs
Mae-ling Lokko Coconut Diaries
Bailey Peryman and Kelly Dombroski Cultivating, Havening
Maria Chávez Too Much Reality
Amba J. Sepie Editorial—“The Wildness in our Bones”
Joar Nango and Axel Wieder A Pact with One’s Own
Adjoa Armah Transformative Study: A Syllabus
Vishwas Satgar The Other Side of Ecocide
Carl Austin Hyatt Listening to Stone Beings
Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood Architecture Without Measure: Notes on Legibility
Rasheedah Phillips Editorial—“Resisting Nostalgia”
Gloria Pavita Acts of Keeping
Hawai‘i Non-Linear A Justice-Advancing Architecture Tour
Nityanand Jayaraman The Perils of Climate Activism
Gordon White Everyone Experiments in (The Invisible) College
Alice McSherry, Paul Moss, and Amba J. Sepie Eating the Sun
Sarover Zaidi The Gift of Food
Lesley Green Applications Invited: Transdisciplinary Scholars to Re-Design Higher Education

Category

Subject