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Ar(chitec)tivism

Plato founded a school of thought in the middle of the 4th century BC. He did not come up with the name he assigned it – he called it the “Academy” since it existed in a place owned by Academus. In his Parallel Lives, the philosopher Plutarch describes how Cimon, a good and handsome Athenian general, was “the first to adorn the city with elegant and prestigious entertainment venues, which soon became exceptionally popular.” His biographer claims that he had planted “plane trees in the Agora”, transforming the Academy “from a barren and dry place into an irrigated garden, which he ornamented with free running tracks and shady promenades”[1]. The name came to associate the place with a function, which still today points to a way of knowing, manners and actions where the act of thinking is engaged (on this topic, please listen to the brief welcoming speech to the new students given by the current Dean of the Faculty of Letters of Lisbon, especially from 01:34 onwards).

Roberto Calasso said in 2001 that the gods had forsaken literature. They fled it because they were its elusive guests, because they were only passing through. Are thought gods? The fact is that knowledge has gradually been restricted: instead of the “irrigated garden”, surrounded by lovely trees, it has become confined to walls, lofty structures, often austere, even oppressive-looking chambers. These are places from which the incentive to reflect, the will to debate and the practice of thinking are fading away. The gods – as guests passing through – appear to have left the walls, the rooms, to infertile human beings, who roam, deprived of their spark, between corridors where beauty is scarce.

Nowadays, these de-divinized – de-sacralised – places, once considered to be the habitat of intellectual geniuses, supermen of rationality – like universities, for example – no longer hold the exclusive right to the activity of thought. Like a crowd of stampeding gods, thought has been scattered across a speckled ether. But the void in which thought now hovers is not an empty place, but its utter dissemination, its complete dispersion, something that can be described as pervasiveness. After all, the act of thinking cannot be suppressed, nor does it cease to exist because the places that tradition has enclosed around it have become vacant – rather, it perpetuates itself by reverting to a notion of open air, of multiplication, of an affirmative immaterial presence. Neither does the fact that it can be produced by human outgrowths, such as the technology capable of formulating statements that can convey what is understood as thought, jeopardize it as such.

Thus, thinking does not rely on a place or a building. Neither the process, nor the instruments, nor the information that is equally considered necessary for the practice of thinking are locked away. Chirping like the bustle of birds huddling together for the night, the practice of thinking is growing wide. It has become more democratic. In particular, it has stopped being restricted to worlds that can be labelled as academic, to places with a school or university name, it has crossed masonry walls and is today boosted by the actions of local authority groups, civil society associations, communities established more or less spontaneously; it is held in small amphitheatres, art galleries, even outdoors, or in former factories. It is not only practiced by scholars, but by ordinary people – philosophers are each and every one of us. Anyone (“anyone”, provided they have access to a computer connected to the Internet, can read and understand what they are reading – a few requirements that are not necessarily available to everyone) may, in principle, debate an idea; in turn, these same ideas are submitted in proposals for research platforms based on social, ecological or community practices. To think is an act of political experience, as it constitutes a community and urban cohabitation practice (without being restricted to the “city”) -,which is becoming increasingly pressing and necessary.

An Academy of Ideas appears to recapture the beautiful, pleasant and free contours of the Platonic locus: “Established by two brothers in Canada […] without any support from or affiliation with any organization or university”, its purpose is “to spread the message of individual freedom and empowerment to as many people as possible”. Since 2005, another Academy of Ideas, backed by numerous companies and organizations, has been promoting a “battle of ideas” around seven principles: freedom of thought, action and expression; agency; the legacy of the Enlightenment in social and scientific experimentation, but also in intellectual ambition and the perpetuation of curiosity; the liberal arts as self-sustaining arts, and education as an end and not a means to other, separate ends; civil liberties, without compromise and in defiance of arbitrary restrictions; rationality; and “open and vigorous debate, in which ideas are questioned, discussed and contested”. The Night of Ideas, an initiative by Villa Albertine, a network of “arts and ideas” stretching from France to the United States, provides an alternative to what I have described above. There are certainly similar initiatives around the world (at least in the closest, western world in which I write) that strive for the ability, the willingness, the exercise of thinking. It is hardly surprising that the arts (see one of the principles mentioned in the previous chapter) are engaged in this practice, this opportunity, this capacity. Even less surprising is the fact that the art of space, architecture, has taken on the form of debating ideas.

This is where the “Laboratory of the Future”, translated into the Portuguese context as Fertile Futures, or the interpretation that Andreia Garcia (curator) and Ana Neiva with Diogo Aguiar (assistant curators) have had of the laboratory expression proposed by Lesley Lokko for the 18th Venice Biennale 2023, is to be found. The three curators affirm that their interpretation of the Biennale’s proposal “gathers”, “in addition to a set of pressing themes, a way of doing things.” “Therefore, with a variety of funding sources – from the most to the least institutional (Ministry of Culture, Directorate-General for the Arts, publications, wine producers, paint factories or, helas!, universities), they have set up a team and organized “Assemblies of Thought”, to which they invited “unofficial curators” (this is how Eglantina Monteiro and Álvaro Domingues introduced themselves in Faro). These are debate sessions involving these guests and “civil society” (another way of saying “the general public”), forming a genuine laboratory practice: free, experimental, cantered on the exercise of reflection as a reflexive exercise and a potential course of action to improve ways of life. Exercising methods of freedom appears complex when an action is based on support such as those I have listed in brackets. But, luckily – or rather, wisely – the laboratory event that took place at Faro’s Fábrica da Cerveja (whose name means Beer Factory, although no beverage has ever been produced there) was exceptional as well as promising and genuine.

During the afternoon of September 2, the final leg of a challenging summer, the packed audience learned about projects, mostly of an architectural or urbanistic nature, focused on the topic of water and suggested measures for specific places. The issues dealt with did not have to have a specific locus, nor did they need to be identifiable with the place where they were – this was a free assembly too. The Ria Formosa or the western Algarve dams, extremely pressing issues with almost no solution, owing to their lateness and the serious nature of the situation, were more than present, they were embodied in each project that was presented and called for debate. This stemmed from cases in which such actions are equally necessary, requiring agency and community consolidation or strengthening – an example being Maja Escher’s eco-artistic interventions around water, rain and the “dead volume” of the Santa Clara dam (Odemira). It confronted viewers with Francisco Janes’ beautiful film Mira-Rio, blending images of Pancho Gueddes’ monument in Sagres with detailed shots of the hands of a man who uses them to love the earth (António Rosa). It was conceived as an alternative laboratory process by Corpo Atelier and Ilhéu Atelier, a set of poetic replies to “architecture’s inability” to arrive at answers to the problematic issues of certain water basins, attempting to “raise global awareness”. The Algarve was (quite well) represented by Alice Pisco and Rosa Guedes, from Plataforma Água Sustentável, and by Marta Cabral (Associação Rota Vicentina).

During the final debate, one of the many architects in the audience was Gonçalo Byrne, who summed up this sense of freedom and urgency: “We must rethink architecture based on a fundamental artivism.” This can be interpreted as a drive for social, ecological and conscious action that arises from architectural thinking – an “architectivism”.

 

[1] Plutarco, Vidas Paralelas. Portuguese translation from the Greek by Ana Maria Guedes Ferreira; Introduction and Notes by Manuel Tröster. Coimbra: Imprensa da Universidade de Coimbra, 2021, page 108. Available on this link.

Ana Isabel Soares (b. 1970) has a PhD in Literary Theory (Lisbon, 2003), and has been teaching in the Algarve University (Faro, Portugal) since 1996. She was one of the founders of AIM – Portuguese Association of Moving Image Researchers. Her interests are in literature, visual arts, and cinema. She writes, translates, and publishes in Portuguese and international publications. She is a full member of CIAC – Research Centre for Arts and Communication.

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