VESSELS

CSM LONDON

Climate Forum is a research, curriculum and ex- change platform that brings the urgent focus of the climate and ecological emergency into the core of the Spatial Practices programme at Central Saint Martins. It engages with history, theory, and prac- tice at the intersection of ethics of care, environ- mental humanities, and the climate and biodiversity crisis to explore the creative potential in emergent and the emergence of socio-ecological futures.

Forest School is a public programme from Central Saint Martins that uses the forest as a prism through which to understand the causes and implications of the climate and ecology emergencies.

manifesto

Unit 2 invites you to:

  1. Co-inhabit our world using all our senses.

  2. Unlearn our ways, to observe, listen and speak.

  3. Embrace words, thoughts, present moments, dierent temporalities; for their nature is changeable.

  4. Engage with processes of embodied practices.

  5. Explore weaving* and dialoguing; these will lead to deeper understandings and new listening technologies.

  6. Create new rituals.

  7. Embrace material and physical space that help you return to your own skin and soul. This will provide the ground for new understandings of shelter.

  8. Embrace discomfort and the unknown.

Weaving Vessels for Liminal Dialogues

“We acknowledge the first territory we inhabit as our body; sacred temple from which forms of interaction are gestated as new languages, seductive dances of creation and discoveries of all the cycles that surround us”

How can architecture represent our relationship with territories (forests and bodies)? How can these relationships become a material and spatial manifes- tation, allowing us to inhabit them?

During this seven-week journey we will collectively work towards a regenerative designed vessel that will host liminal dialogues, give voice to the un- voiced, allow us to explore rituals of belongings and create new possible worlds through radical listening and imagining. Unit 2 aims to generate opportunities for students to approach ideas of design, architec- ture and infrastructures through liminal dialogues with the non-human and more than human. This Unit oers an immersion in new narratives and new ways of knowing that range from unexpected dialogues to an exploration of new presences and awareness. We will engage with our own econiche – an ecologi- cal understanding of our places in the world, and through spatial experimentations, we will produce new rituals and knowledge that problematises nature-culture relations. Explorations will be in- formed by our hybrid identities full of tensions and contradictions, by our roots to territories and their inhabitants, and from the recognition of dynamic relations that connect us to all the manifestations of life this planet we co-inhabit.

For this Unit we consider the body as the starting point. It is the 1rst territory we inhabit, and the
one through which we gestate forms of interaction with our environment. It is the territory from where we feel, create languages and discover cycles that connect us with other living beings. Listening to our own bodies allows us, beyond understanding what happens in it and with it, to re#ne the ways in which we relate and interweave with other territories, and with the bodies that are part of a larger collective body: the territory we inhabit. This territory, we believe, is a vessel of knowledge that is as diverse as the bodies that inhabit it. It is a territory that de- marcates the path to our deepest humanity. A path which will lead us to a journey of transformation and allow us to understand our purpose within the entangled webs of life that co-inhabit our planet.

Syntony between thinking, word and gesture is manifested in weaving and through weaving. Weav- ing is the network that we co-create through rela- tions and conversations that connect us, as well
as the spatial and material manifestation of the languages and narratives that originate from the en- counters of bodies and territories. Weaving we see as process and outcome. This will lead to our ethics of co-creation.

UNIT 2:

*Some thoughts to start weaving with:

  1. Visualise how we can engage with the magnetic !elds manifested in sacred geometry; a !eld that protects us and shares with us the intangible.

  2.  How can we build bridges to weave deep conversations about the challenges we share as humanity? How can these bridges give voice to non-western epistemologies, and create a living archive for voices to be heard in all possible contexts? How can these bridges prompt conversations between communities that share common wounds and wealth of knowledge?

  3. How can we understand architecture as an infrastructure of shelter and care?

  4. How is co-creation a form of ethical intercultural dialogue based on ethics of community approach and respect for the origins of processes and materials.

  5. Can we understand a territory as the manifestation of diverse cosmovisions and non-western epistemologies?

  6. Can we recognize and work towards weaving regenerative architecture as a host for liminal dialogues between different disciplines, cultures and new narratives of coexistence?

  7. Can regenerative design enact new presences and new rituals, from the rootedness and respect for a territory, its knowledge and its inhabitants, and from the recognition of the dynamic relationships that connect us with all manifestations of life on earth?