Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
29—31 October
We bring together voices from science, art, philosophy and architectural research and practice for three days of lectures and public debate at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Each day culminates in a drink & talk, an informal gathering where everyone is invited to share their ideas.
The three-day conference follows the curator’s three exhibitionary lines of investigation, Fluxes, Spectres and Lighter, dedicating a day of debates to each. The Talks bring together major experts from architecture together with figures from various disciplines that intersect architecture, which is considered as a methodology to think, mend and practice social orders and their spatial arrangements. Activists, architects, anthropologists, artists, designers, scientists and writers are invited to engage with one of the three leitmotivs of the project.
TALK, TALK, TALK
Weight, the element at the core of How Heavy Is a City?, is one of the largest elephants in this cumbersome, deranged and dystopic room called the Anthropocene, which humanity created for itself and others.
It is unquestionable that there has been a global and massive redistribution of weight upon the surface of the Earth, caused by all the materials that have been, and continue to be, extracted, mined, transformed, produced, repurposed and rearranged by and for all sorts of human activities. The way people live, circulate, consume, produce and pollute has immense consequences for the composition and stability of the planet as a whole.
In parallel, if we consider that weight is not only the expression of a body’s mass but also the downward force that this body produces, simply by existing, and that the pressure it is capable of generating may have an overall effect on the planet, how is pressure acting as an agent of transformation upon our present-future world?
Talk, Talk, Talk will lead towards an investigation of the role of weight and pressure on spatial, infrastructural, relational and environmental matters over the three day conference.
Filipa Ramos