Andrés Jaque - TRANSMATERIAL POLITICS

CONCEPT AND REALISATION
Chair of Architecture and Territorial Planning $Prof. Milica Topalovic & Prof. Marc Angélil, ETH Zürich Department of Architecture
The event is part of the lecture series
SESSIONS ON TERRITORY­-URBANISM BEYOND NEOLIBERALISM
SESSIONS ON TERRITORY is a series of public debates on the political economy of architecture and territory within and beyond the neoliberal order. The seminar’s objective is to unravel forces at work in the formation and the perception of the contemporary city, and, as importantly, to spur debates that challenge the status quo. Every intervention by a guest speaker will be followed by a panel discussion with invited respondents. This semester’s series on POWER constitutes the first installment of Sessions on Territory-Urbanism Beyond Neoliberalism.
The Sessions on Territory are a collaboration between the professorships of Marc Angelil and Milica Topalovic.
Please find all lectures here: topalovic.arch...
20.11.2017
TRANSMATERIAL POLITICS
Andrés Jaque with Andreas Ruby
The sequence started the moment that one of the young boys living in the family farm in Touba decided to emigrate to Madrid. At this point, the family matriarch at the farmhouse in Touba called one of the males living in Madrid, an older cousin of the boy. The cousin did not answer his cell phone but, instead, headed to a phone parlor where he could obtain better rates for international calls. There, he called the family matriarch to learn of the next arrival. He asked her to stress the need for the boy to walk all the way to either an African grocery store or a Senegalese restaurant in the Lavapiés district. The plan succeeded and, several months later, the young boy made his way to the African grocery in Lavapiés where he found people who put him in touch with his relative. He then took a place in a shared apartment with his cousin and four other Mouride men. It is important to consider the nature of the urban composition in which this event developed: not a city but a fragmented transnational assemblage. In this urban constellation, built devices - such as the apartments, mosque, phone parlors, African grocery stores, and Senegalese restaurants in Lavapiés - are activated in the urban scene only by interacting with a number of diverse technologies including cell phones, rugs, speakers, online platforms, and money transfer services. This urbanism is not shaped by the city itself - neither by its grid nor by the volumes and spaces its buildings create- but by an association of diverse devices that interact to produce an interscalar ecosystem of heterogeneous entities. Fragments of this constellation can be found in shared spaces collectively constructed in the minds and books of the Mouride believers. These fragments are connected by interaction and the performativity of urban dynamics. They gain continuity when phone calls are made, money transfers are ordered, and the relatives of recent immigrants are informed of arrivals. The urbanism by which the Mouride family is enacted is not fixed but performative. Such an urbanism challenges the ways we think politics is embodied in architecture.