Xeno-Architecture on Archinect

Feb 17 2017

Interview with Lietje Bauwens, Wouter De Raeve and Alice Haddad on a collective project xeno-architecture, with A. Avanessian, M. Miessen, A. Hennig, L. Parisi, & D. Falb on Archinect.

The collective Laboria Cuboniks rooted at the Emancipation as Navigation summer school in 2014 in Berlin. Over two weeks, thinkers from all over the world came together to elaborate on different rationalities and knowledge productions in times of ‘organized disorientation’ (c.f. Badiou). Among the points that bonded the feminist collective was the fact that a lot of the female thinkers had been accused of bowing to the patriarchy for avowing such concepts as ‘reason’, ‘science’, and ‘universalism’. The xenofeminist manifesto is basically a reclaiming and re-appropriating of those concepts, arguing that feminists—better yet, everybody—should stop settling for the margins. Xenofeminism is strongly influenced by accelerationism but it’s the focus on the ‘xeno’ instead of ‘acceleration’ that appealed to us. Especially Patricia Reed’s closing essay in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, where she expresses her dissatisfaction with the ambiguous injunction to ‘accelerate’, which serves to popularize and polemicize the movement inspired us. She offers seven alternative prescriptions which are inspirational for our search for a “xeno-architecture”: reorientate, eccentricate, speculate, fictionalize, geometricize, commonize and abstractify...