Nine Islands: Matters Around Architecture

NEMESTUDIO, Neyran Turan & Mete Sonmez (Turkey)

Galata Greek Primary School

“In the context of the new geological epoch posited by the Anthropocene, might a re-conceptualization of material, with both its geographic and geologic dimensions, bring a new conception of materiality for architecture? ‘To call human beings geological agents,’ as historian Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, ‘is to scale up our imagination of the human.’… From Timothy Morton’s ‘hyperobjects,’ which depict the environment as a compilation of immense objects — such as the polystyrene cups that will still be around after 500 years — vastly distributed in time and space relative to humans, to media theorist Jussi Parikka’s geological studies of media — which build an alternative theoretical lineage for materials, chemistry, and waste — can we consider a similar intellectual shift in our understanding of architectural materiality within a longer span of time, and a larger span of Earth?” –NT

Nine Islands: Matters Around Architecture is a mixed-media installation that reflects on the temporal and geographical origins of architectural materiality. Nine “islands” constructed from lavish building materials are comprised of a top part representing an “architectural” reworking of a material, and a bottom part uncovering the way the material was sourced. Accompanied by nine drawings, these “nine Islands” call attention to both the geographical origin and the geological time that is embedded in all architectural matter.