ateliermob / working with the 99%

Ateliermob is a multidisciplinary platform for the development of ideas, research and projects in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, design and urbanism. It was founded in 2005, in Lisbon, as the result of several works carried out independently by its founding partners. Currently, it is constituted by two partners – Andreia Salavessa and Tiago Mota Saraiva – who, alongside a team of a dozen other skilled professionals, associate, when possible, with external entities and technicians in order to enrich and broaden the spectrum of its multidisciplinary approach to architecture with the goal of best serving the specific needs of the communities they work with.

This approach contributed to the creation, in 2016, of the cooperative “Working with the 99%”, which aims to provide services in the fields of architecture, in projects of social and design intervention, urban and strategic planning, coordination and implementation of projects, as well as training. The research conducted through these activities aims to inform and better support the project-practice of the studio and is responsible for, among other things, maintaining an online architecture platform and conducting several architectural, design and urban planning projects in close proximity and collaboration with the dwellers of the environment being intervened.

ateliermob/working with the 99% has a regular presence in various forums and national and international networks such as the European ReKreators network, the Observatory of Mexico City, DLBC Lisbon Network, the laboratory of participatory practices developed in the region of Basilicata, in Italy, or the official representation of Portugal at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2014.

You can check ateliermob/working with the 99% website here

José Augusto Pádua

6—7 January 2020 // Anthropogenic Landscapes of Inequality

José Augusto Pádua is Full Professor of Brazilian Environmental History at the Institute of History, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) and co-directs the Laboratory of History and Nature. He holds a BA in History, a M.Sc and a PhD in Political Science and a post-doctoral fellowship in History.  From 2010 to 2015, he was President of the Brazilian Association of Research and Graduate Studies on Environment and Society. He was a fellow of the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society (Munich).  He was part of the team that designed the Museum of Tomorrow (Rio de Janeiro, 2016) and he is still a member of its scientific board. As expert in Environmental History and Politics he delivers lectures, courses and participates in field work in more than 40 countries. He publishes regularly in Brazil and abroad. His most recent works are J. A. Pádua, J. Soluri and C. Leal, eds., A Living Past: Environmental Histories of Modern Latin America, New York: Berghahn, 2018 and J. A. Pádua, “Brazil in the history of the Anthropocene” in Liz-Rejane Issberner, Philippe Léna, eds., Brazil in the Anthropocene Conflicts between predatory development and environmental policies, New York: Routledge, 2017.

Daniela Pinto

9—10 January 2020 // Funny Animals

Daniela Pinto holds a doctoral degree in microbiology from the University of Lisbon, Portugal. With the support of a Marie Curie IEF, in 2014 she joined the Ludwig- Maximilians University Munich (Germany) where she designed synthetic genetic circuits using transcription factors. In 2016 she joined the Technical University Dresden (Germany), where she is now a postdoctoral researcher. In the summer of 2018, she spent 3 months at the University of Copenhagen, where she studied the evolution of alternative σ factors under the support of an EMBO short-term fellowship. Her current research interests span several aspects of alternative σ factor biology: their diversity, activation mechanisms, evolution and synthetic biology applications. She is now planning to study the evolution of signal transduction systems and their role in the evolution of cognitive behavior in bacteria. Over the last 8 years, Daniela has published 14 papers in peer-reviewed international journals and is the first author in 10 of them. She is since 2018, a member of the basal cognition group, a group of international scientists that aims at tracing the biological mechanisms necessary for cognition, from bacteria to higher animals.

Aidan Koch

9—10 January 2020 // Funny Animals

Aidan Koch (Seattle, 1988) is an artist based in New York, whose multidisciplinary practice includes experimental graphic narratives. Her comics break down the medium to its minimal elements, tracing ambiguous visual and verbal fragments between the visible and absent, poetry and silence. Her works include recurring motifs, like artifacts from classical and ancient cultures, that move from Koch’s comics to her paintings, sculptures, ceramics, and textiles. In 2017, Koch created the Institute for Interspecies Art and Relations, where she mobilizes theory, ethics, and aesthetics in the production of knowledge about and public awareness of human-nonhuman relations. From her prolific career, the comic books The Whale (2010), The Blonde Woman (2012) and Impressions (2014) are among her best-know works, as well as multiple individual and group exhibitions in the United States and Europe.

The Sonic Ecology of the Tourist City

9-10 January 2020 // Perception and Narrative
Ivo Louro, Iñigo Sanchez, Daniel Paiva, Margarida Mendes with Brandon LaBelle

Although the Anthropocene is largely represented through graphs, maps and vivid images of environmental disasters, its global changes are equally present in how a place sounds and the way it shapes the possibilities for listening and sounding of situated people and other living beings. From the hums and sonic bursts of deep sea mining to the prospect of silent springs to come, by way of the trolley rattling and engineered-for-authenticity sonic ambiances of the tourist city, listening to Anthropocene topologies invites new reflections on scale, presence, permanence, agency and the experience and politics underlying this proposed epoch.

This seminar invites participants to reflect on these concerns by way of a situated case: the touristification of Lisbon. Recent scholarship has scrutinized the anthropocenic force of mass tourism around issues of sustainability, environmental ethics, power relations, and/or mobility. As Lisbon becomes an increasingly popular tourist destination, these issues are embedded within the city’s shifting sonic ambiances. Through a combination of theory and practice, this seminar will explore the sonic impacts of touristification in Lisbon and ask how the sonic ecology of cities affected by mass tourism can help us sense and reflect on the interplay of global eco-sociological changes turned into local issues and vice-versa.

Building, Dwelling, Thinking in the Anthropocene

9-10 January 2020 // Perception and Narrative
André Pereira, Ateliermob / working with the 99%

How does one dwell in the Anthropocene? Sustained environmental change in the course of a human life has been either exceptional or too slow to be perceptible, allowing for “timeless ways of building.” In contrast, inhabiting the Anthropocene requires architecture and city planning to be able to contend with rapidly shifting socio-ecological environmental shifts, which create very observable communal, social, and political stresses. These are manifest in our built surroundings and raise questions of housing rights, the power relations between center and periphery and sustainable building.
In this seminar, we will reflect on the challenges that mass migration, resource management, and market dynamics impose on the practitioners of architecture (be they professional or not) and how the shape of cities, houses and communities are affected by them.

Funny Animals

9-10 January 2020 // Perception and Narrative
Hugo Almeida, Ana Matilde Sousa, Aidan Koch, Daniela Pinto, Pedro Moura

This seminar takes the concept of “funny animals”—the anthropomorphic animal characters originating in comics and cartoons—as a starting point for participants to explore a wide variety of “character” representations. From the onset of mass culture, advertising, cartoons and comics have used anthropomorphic animals to both domesticate the unfamiliar and unfamiliarize the domestic. Today, cute mascots and LOLcat memes populate the commodity- and media-spheres, alongside daily social media testimonies of animal intelligences and their interactions with humans or among themselves. But representation in the third person inevitably raises the question of what belongs to the represented and what is a projection of the representer. In the face of a Sixth Great Extinction, how does our obsession with animal characters impact who gets to survive, on individual and populational levels? How can nonhumans be interpreted in “their own terms” or made to “speak” in interspecies dialogues? Recognizing the presence of nonhumans in peoples’ imaginaries as sites of both sentimental investment and radical strangeness might hold the key to a participatory and inclusive trans-species project.

This seminar will combine a theoretical part with workshop-like activities in which participants will be writing/drawing creatively together. The activities will accommodate different creative comfort levels and participants with a variety of backgrounds, focusing on how to develop or represent non-human characters.

Repoliticizing the Anthropocene

6-7 January 2020 // Systems of Social and Technological Organization
Davide Scarso, Elizabeth Johnson, Rita Natálio

The Anthropocene has been described both as the token of a global environmental awareness and as a inherently depoliticizing notion, promoting a technocratic rule of experts oblivious to social justice and democratic participation. At the same time, political agency appears split between a longing for systemic change through the intervention of global institutions and reliance on the individual responsibility of all of us citizens-consumers.
The invention of new political approaches to the socio-environmental problems that we are facing today and, probably in harsher conditions, in the near future implies a radical engagement with the non-human components of the world. Nonetheless, a distinction between human social life and natural phenomena often constitute an inescapable reference for thinking political action itself, at least in an emancipatory perspective.
By discussing fundamental notions like “Sustainability”, “Decarbonization”, “Capitalocene” or “Green New Deal”, this seminar will explore the tensions between the need to “politicizing nature” and the always-impending risk of “naturalizing politics”, asking under which conditions and through which processes the Anthropocene could be the site for experimenting new forms of autonomous and more egalitarian collective organization.

Dating Datafication? History, Epistemology and Politics of Big Data

6-7 January 2020 // Systems of Social and Technological Organization
Jaume Valentines-Álvarez, C.I.R.C.E., Staffan Müller-Wille

The epistemological, social, and energy implications of Big Data are central to recent debates on the multilayered global crises, the geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge, and the control of borders, desires and dissidence at the core of the Anthropocene (or Data-cene?). This seminar is devoted to collectively discussing this global and ubiquitous entity in its social, gendered, and material contexts. It will pay special attention to the long and “slow” history of big scientific data, data-centrism and algorithm governance, which is usually neither considered when looking at the immediacy and speed of data circulation nor when thinking the genealogy of the slow disasters. Through workshops, visits and discussions, we will also explore the role of the Small (communities of hackers, activists, alternative media or social databases from the margins) in contesting the merged scientific and political authorities displayed by the Big (big data, big science, big media, big companies or states). The environmental, social, and epistemological challenges that Big Data poses to science and politics need to be critically observed and discussed to depict new horizons. Convivial thinking, collaborative outputs, and, if possible, good spirits are expected from the participants of the seminar.