Loss as an Invitation for Future by RRA

RRA (Radical Research & Re-storying Agency) consists of Victoria McKenzie, Noah Goatlib and Fiona Cuypers-Stanienda for SOFT EIS, Publication, Fall 2023.

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(Small Exert:)

Introducing our way out 

What does it mean to pave a future without a recognition of what was lost? In moving to the space of ‘loss’, perhaps we are returning to a space defined by architecture and the ways that we inhabit the Earth. Coming from the old English los meaning ‘ruin or destruction’, ‘Loss’ is a provocation for where we find ourselves now–in the midst of ruins. The 21st century has seen a nearly complete collapse of the climate, environmental destruction, social and racial inequities, displacement, and war. With all of the challenges faced by the contemporary conditon, it’s necessary to ask, ‘how did we get here?’ and furthermore,‘how do we get out?’. 

We’re all familiar with the story of the birth of global capitalism. The prized child of colonialism and the foremother of a neoliberal agenda. Our education systems are filled with an almost singular narrative of history where the inquisition and conquest of European explorers as well as the singularity of ‘Christopher Columbus’, becomes something told worldwide. Our agricultural systems are filled with this story, where intensive mass production, the creation of plantation systems and humanity’s desire for control over nature is exerted. Our social systems are filled with this story, where hierarchies of race, class and gender are created in order to maintain division and unequal distribution of wealth. And our architecture is filled with this story, where the current lineage of design born from modernism treats the world as a ‘tabula rasa’ or a ‘blank slate’. The Earth functions as an empty plain to project the vision of the architect, thrusting us into a moment in which the climate changes, further cementing violence, not just for humanity, but for the Earth. With all these challenges of the colonial past and capitalist present, we are left, once more, asking the question ‘how do we get out’? 

We propose looking to a time before in order to get to a time after–a pre-colonial time before the system took hold. If something different existed before then not only is there a possibility of something existing after, but there can be an after. As anti-capitalist theorist Mark Fisher once said, the most insidious part of this system is that we can sooner imagine the end of the world than we can imagine the end of capitalism. Perhaps, if we look to a pre-colonial time, the complexity and entanglement between people, community and Earth which was symbiotic and relational within African and Indigenous ways of being and designing, presents a new template for architecture and the ways we construct our world.