Seventh Lisbon Architecture Triennale

Unhoused is a state of permanent homelessness. It implies the systematic deconstruction of an individual's or a group's physical and cultural ties to the place where they live. In the case of European Slums, and particularly the ones related with Roma ethnicity, such as Pata Rât or Cañada Real, this process of unhousing takes place through delocalisation and by preventing the continuity of dwellings. Unhousing is enacted by relocating and excluding the community to a place that makes the construction of any personal or collective relationship unimaginable. Such communities are denied any legal relationship with their new or prior home. They are denied land rights, provisions of essential services and any legal administration.

This condition throws inhabitants into a radical exteriority. The more violent and pervasive the condition of living in exteriority, the more brutal their condition of eviction. The exteriority with which the inhabitants are subjected is climatic and environmental, as well as social and cultural. Inhabitants are forced outside, without shelter, protection or compassion, and without the right to be considered as equals. By consequence, they are unable to establish any kind of link with society, or claim any kind of access to fundamental rights. They are condemned to permanent and systematic exile from the very place they live. 

In many cases, these processes of dispossession are accompanied by an extreme version of environmental violence. In Pata Rât or Cañada Real, communities endure a highly polluted environment as they live next to a landfill. This risks their environmental safety and forces them into exploitative working conditions as the only possibility. The toxic environment spreads to the water and air they consume and breathe, as well as to their cultural and social relationship to the area. This process tends to invade these people’s daily lives, depriving them of any kind of material culture and relationship to place, and it does so by silently damaging everything around, down to the inside of their bodies.

Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efren García Grinda are co-founders of the Madrid-based practice amid.cero9, and widely known as Cristina y Efrén. Known for their experimental and interdisciplinary approach, integrating architecture with cultural practices, ecology, literature, and pop culture in projects with a strong conceptual focus. Díaz Moreno and García Grinda have taught at institutions such as the Architectural Association in London Harvard GSD or Princeton SoA, the Angewandte, Vienna, Staedelschule Frankfurt, Akademie der Bildenden Kunste,IKA, Vienna, among many other institutions. They work approaches architecture as a cultural and intellectual practice, relating it to the creation of significant environments that act as small cosmologies and spaces for exchange and mediation.