Seventh Lisbon Architecture Triennale

Spectres investigates the imaging technologies required to understand the impact of human-made spaces on the planet, and the ways in which these technologies echo imperial and colonial structures of extraction and power. The transformation of what we used to call the city is inextricable from both the imaginal technologies that guide extraction — remote sensing, thermal imaging, radar, sonar, lidar — and from the ‘ghost acreages’ where the energy and materials sustaining contemporary logistical capitalism emanate from: mining, illegal deforestation, rapid urbanisation, rising sea levels, destruction of tropical forests and glaciers, and the reshaping of human mobility and security.

Asking how heavy a city is positions architecture both as the object and the method of inquiry into the challenges of climate chaos: it is the object on display and under scrutiny, examined in its material configurations; and it is through architecture that we venture into the issue of expansion of the contemporary city onto all existing territories it cuts across. What are the new ways through which we can understand the scale, diversity and magnitude of the Anthropocene?