MATERIA ARQUITECTURA is a bi-annual publication on architecture, published since 2009 by the School of Architecture of the Universidad San Sebastián. As a documentation, dissemination and reference tool, the magazine aims to broaden knowledge of the discipline from a critical perspective, with the aim of opening new discourses on contemporary architecture.
MATERIA ARQUITECTURA is open to the entire academic and professional community, both national and international. The journal has a special interest in publishing works related to the theoretical research and practical production of contemporary architecture.
I. CALL FOR PAPERS
The editors invite you to submit papers reflecting the state of art in the discipline, preferably derived from academic research.
> MATERIA ARQUITECTURA N°26
Publication date: August 2024. Submission deadline: April 15, 2024
“A new cartographer”. This is how philosopher Gilles Deleuze referred to his colleague Michel Foucault,
highlighting his ability to examine the constructed reality by power relations –forces– that are usually invisible
or invisibilized. Cartographying these spatial dimensions is of great relevance in the field of architecture, as it
positions us in an architecture that is not limited to surfaces, figures and objects, but expands and becomes
sensitive to the forces that promote them and the bodies that construct them.
In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault links the architectural types implemented by the
State in the eighteenth century -school, workshop, hospital, prison- to the normalization of the body. Despite
their formal differences, they all shared the same forces, using a “disciplinary diagram” that sought to enforce
behavior in confined spaces. They aspire to an architecture without any kind of “obstacle, resistance or
friction,” something that Foucault himself radically rejected, assuring that there will always be an escape, a
line of flight, a resistance, however minimal. And it is precisely in these cracks that an architecture of resistance
will emerge, built by bodies in resistance. Bodies defined by their power, by what they can do. Bodies that are
hypersensitive to lines of flight in oppressive and alienating contexts.
But what is an architecture of resistance? how is it constructed? At what scales? from what fissures? what forms
and forces drive it? what is its sensitive regime? what degrees of visibility does it offer? is it clandestine? which
bodies in resistance promote it and who tries to avoid it? And above all, how can we map it?
Cartography is not tracing or reproducing, it goes beyond outlining buildings and streets. Cartographying
involves thinking spatially beyond the purely quantitative, formal and delimited, to visualize a spatial reality
full of subjectivities, temporalities, displacements, tensions and corporealities of all kinds. It seeks to be graphic
evidence that questions and expands knowledge and, like those bodies in resistance, it operates beyond the
purely optical and visual, being haptic and tactical. Cartography is sensitive not only to forms, but to forces.
There are no innocent lines in cartography.
Throughout the 26th issue of Materia Arquitectura, the editors are looking for the cartography of resistances that are
being built in the conflicts of the present, but also those that are still silenced in the archive, with the intention
of recognizing ‘bodies’ –human and non-human, subaltern and outside the norm, clandestine or oppressed,
with ignored or unrecognized identity– and ‘territories’ –borders, peripheries, refugee camps, ghettos,
colonies, slums, shantytowns, popular neighborhoods– traditionally excluded from architectural thought
because of their mundane and subversive conditions.
From this critical position, which reveals that architecture has never been neither innocent nor neutral, we seek
contributions and case studies that illustrate the potential of resistance as a spatial and architectural practice
of great relevance in the contemporary context.
More information can be found in the full call for papers here.