SOTAN-network and the Research Project Turfiction, University of Iceland are calling for participants for a workshop in Reykjavik and field sites in North of Iceland from 10-16 July, 2022.
This is a week long workshop/fieldwork where participants will approach the island’s vernacular architecture – the Icelandic turf house - as an interlocutor to impact the thinking about how future architecture can become accountable for forming new relations —’temporal belongings’— between species reflecting upon the benefits of a sustainable coliving.
The research project approaches the turf house as a superorganism, consisting of complicated root systems, soil, fungi, mycelium, microbes, water, plants, lichen, stones, wood, insects, mice, cows, sheep, and humans. It raises the question how it can mobilize humans to become more receptive to more-than-human worlds? The turf house depends not only on soil, micro-organisms, and rhizomatic root growth; its architectonic space is also formed by multispecies interdependence for heating purposes, for example. The baðstofa (the common room) was often built above the space that housed cows, sheep etc. that generated heat for humans and other nonhumans.
Calling into being collaborative living with other-than-humans enhances human sensorial apparatuses and enriches sensory perception with sensibilities characteristic of the nonhuman sphere. To use the words of von Dooren et al (2016) the workshop celebrates,’different modes of attentive immersion’ on our journey of opening up practices of co-worlding – creating and performing visions, fictions, imaginaries, sound, and stories of multispecies and earthen politics.
Workshop covers international and local travels, accommodation, dinners and honorarium.
