On the Future of Cohabitation in Art, Architecture, and Philosophy
Swamps and the New Imagination (Sternberg Press, MIT Press, 2020) edited by Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas and Kristupas Sabolius, is a book that sets up a cross-disciplinary dialogue to challenge conventional concepts of territory with aims to reorganize identities and realities and to envision the role of the immaterial in architecture, art, and nature.
It is not easy to define a swamp, even in biology. The term is frequently used to characterize marshes, bogs, mires, wetlands, meadows, and other grey zones between land and water. In that sense, “swamp” is a metonym for a variety of transitional ecosystems and functions. This book invokes that concept as a tool to address the vital urgency of human cohabitation with other forms of life, placing the swamp at the crossroad of disciplines and practices. It is more than a biological ecosystem; it is a milieu of manifold sympoietic relationships, a locus of imagination, fostering the dialogue for possible futures. It is also a very particular modality—“an interface of Gaia”—offering a “face,” a certain physiognomy to faceless networks of relations, inviting us to engage in regimes of entanglement. The contributors to this volume expand on swampy notions, probing global and speculative art and architecture, intercalating philosophy and queer theory, and filtering these notions through the lens of posthumanist ecology, informed by the histories and theories of cybernetics, sociology, and the commons.
Contributors
Lorena Bello and Brent D. Ryan, Nikola Bojić, Chiara Bottici, Jonathan Jae-an Crisman and Newton Harrison, Glorianna Davenport and Gershon Dublon, T.J. Demos, Vittoria Di Palma, Jennifer Gabrys, Tinna Grétarsdóttir and Sigurjón Baldur Hafsteinsson, Stefan Helmreich, Stefanie Hessler, Yuk Hui, Giedrė Jankevičiūtė, Caroline A. Jones, Lars Bang Larsen, Bruno Latour, Gintautas Mažeikis, Astrida Neimanis, Kate Orff and Mariel Villeré, Andrew Pickering, Kristina Lee Podesva, Elizabeth A. Povinelli, María Puig de la Bellacasa and Dimitris Papadopoulos, Cristina Ricupero, Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, Kristupas Sabolius, Saskia Sassen, Caterina Scaramelli, Marco Scotini, Pelin Tan, Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, Angela Vettese
