ADS2: Demonic Shores – Imaginaries of Indeterminacy in the Age of Logistics

With the advent of modernity arrived the ferocious imposition of thresholds regulating flows in our world system. Out of the circulations triggered by transatlantic slavery, global capitalism coalesced into being. Cartography enabled the projection onto new territories of the desire for seamless transit, the imagination of capital crystallised into logistical infrastructures. A line between land and sea was drawn; bodies born to be free were racialised as unfree labour; nature coerced to the will of capital. As matter and geography were made to conform to circulations mapped and projected by capital, the violence of logistical determinacy extended beyond the shoreline. The unknowable spaces of indeterminate life – what Sylvia Winter described as the ‘demonic’ – endured the coercive impositions of measure, control, and logistical calculation. Held in a tense architecture of infrastructures, the flows that feed daily patterns of life and dictate architectural development continue to depend on cartographic systems that inscribe bodies and the earth with extractive logics whilst foreclosing other ways of being.

ADS2 explores the world-making possibilities of cartography. Delving into the unpredictable realm of the demonic, the studio examines tensions lying between spaces of indeterminacy and logistical systems that traverse them. By deconstructing infrastructures and technologies of logistical cartographic systems, ADS2 confronts the geo-racial-sexual violence of the worlds they imagine. The studio explores other cartographic knowledges stemming from embodied experiences of black life, non-linear conceptions of time, more-than-human perspectives, and indigenous subjectivities as the foundation for design interventions.

Tutors: Dele Adeyemo, Ibiye Camp and Dámaso Randulfe