In 1970 Ivan Illich published Deschooling Society, where he advocated the abolition of schools and their replacement with “a new style of educational model of learning, sharing and caring among peers”. He criticises the Western model of schools for its absence of imagination and experimentation in methods and its emphasis on teaching and not learning. Illich proposed a lifelong learning model of autonomous and self-directed education networks outside the schools remit, combining educational objects, peer learning, mentorship, and reference services.

Illich was not the first one that propose the abolition of schools. Brazilian popular educator Paulo Freire, a couple of years earlier, published Pedagogy of the Oppressed, as a manifesto of the idea of educating one another through interaction, dialogue, personal exchanges, and collaboration in the places where we live our lives, without resorting to schools, professional educators and sophisticated teaching methodologies. Freire’s ideas depart from his involvement in the movement of liberation in Brazil and are influenced by the post-colonial theory of Frantz Fanon.

Illich and Freira’s ideas which seemed utopian andunscholarly at the time, soon they will became popular in the architecture education circles and fuelled a stream of student movements and radical changes. Archizoom founding member Andrea Branzi reviewed Illich’s book in 1973  as part of the “The abolition of school – Radical Note no. 4” article published in the Italian architecture magazine Casabella. Giancarlo De Carlo will also write in Casabella and Domus magazines about the limitations ofinstitutional boundaries and the need to move beyond them. Students inParis revolted in 1968 rejecting the Beaux-Arts pedagogical mode, and atColumbia University strikes forced the studio space to become a protest site.The same year in Milan, students occupied the Triennale di Milano as an act of criticism,and in 1969 the building of the School of Art and Architecture at Yale was surroundedby flames during the  “Free the Panthers”demonstrations. In London, the Architectural Association described by RemKoolhaas as “a school awash in sex, drugs and rock and roll. David Bowiehanging at the bar; architecture’s answer to the Beatles; Anything goes,everything goes. For the studio, write a book if you want. Dance or piss your pants if you want.”

This presentation travels between the ideas of the abolition of the school of Illich and Freira and their later translations in architecture pedagogies. Tracing continuities, in the different historical moments of deschooling movements, the presentation will discuss how these theories have become relevant again in today´s technological, environmental and decolonial challenges. Alongside, the presentation will explore the role of the body in the deschooling movements asa protagonist and how today it can again become a valuable tool.

Since its excavation, the alluring frescoes of Pompeii depicting pleasurable bodies, buildings and mythologies have taken on their own language as objects of desire. The ashen preservation of the city’s history has inspired both real and fantastical projections onto its mysterious architectures since the late 1700s. Positioning myself between these two perceptions, the research reconsiders the biases, fabulations and reinterpretations of these artefacts within today’s digital ruins of the 21st century.

The first chapter considers the patriarchal perspectives that have donned the sites of Pompeii to this day, and questions how images and reinterpretations have changed over time through feminist perspectives. The chapter will examine in detail the narratives written of one of the most heralding and acclaimed sites in Ancient Pompeii, The Villa of Mysteries. Since the frescos’ discovery in 1909, the depicted women of Room 5 in the Villa have been the objects of fascination and wild speculations concerning their religion, relationships, and their sexual and love lives. The project responds to gendered assumptions and patriarchal lenses that have shaped the interpretation of these images since its excavation from archaeological writings, psychoanalysis and surrealist art, towards second-wave feminist responses and queer art movements inspired by the work. The chapter will look specifically at two artistic renditions of the Villa’s famous frieze, Maria Borosso’s watercolour rendition of the scene made within the first few years of the villa’s excavation, and David Cannon Dashiell’s Queer Mysteries, a translated story of the villa through the queer lens of the late 1990s.

Finally, the theme of forgeries will be considered in the theoretical approach to compare the image of the artefact, its expanded narrative and writings on the feminine between historical and contemporary digital practice. Archaeological histories of Rosemary Joyce, James Mellaart, Margarete Bieber, Sigmund Freud and more recent artists including Ed Atkins will be investigated.

On August 9, 1960, during the regime of Portuguese dictator António de Oliveira Salazar, the Monument of the Discoveries, or Padrão dos Descobrimentos, was officially inaugurated in Belém, Lisbon. The monument was to mark the 500th anniversary of the death of Prince Henry the Navigator (Infante Dom Henrique), who played a significant role in Portugal’s early maritime Atlantic exploration and its colonial expansions, including the African coast and the Atlantic islands. The Salazar government (and its artists, the architect Cottinelli Telmo and sculptor Leopoldo de Almeida) viewed the construction of the monument as a means of celebrating and legitimising Portugal's colonial empire at a time when anti-colonial movements were gaining momentum worldwide. The monument is designed in the shape of a ship and features statues of key figures in Portuguese exploration, including Prince Henry, Vasco da Gama, Pedro Álvares Cabral, and Ferdinand Magellan. This paper will revisit this monument, the first version of which was a temporary structure created for the 1940 Portuguese World Fair. Due to its popularity, it was later rebuilt as a permanent structure in steel and cement. Through a short film and a series of photographs, I will reflect on the monument's appearance today on the northern bank of the Tagus estuary.

My artistic practice aims to confront the historical, socio-political and cultural narratives of contemporary Belém and Portuguese society, where such monuments continue to reinforce architectural symbols and social choreographies rooted in colonial legacies. I have gathered a collection of public monuments, as well as key public spaces that influence culture, knowledge and language - such as museums, libraries, archives, churches, theatres and lecture halls - which I intend to cross-examine within this framework. Taking a practice-led and autobiographical approach, I will present recent performance + installation work in which I experiment with the intersection of crowd atmospheres, sound and spectatorship work, such as shared moments of collective silence, echoes and gentle sonic gestures such as footsteps and hums, to articulate institutional critique.

In my presentation I will share my proposal for an opera that evokes a panoramic analysis of the 'construction of capital' itself through an enacted interrogation of hegemonic ideals of 'a spectacle', 'a rehearsal', 'the spectator', as these roles are blurred by the point of reproduction. I am interested in investigative modes of operation; addressing and deconstructing architectures of power in modern European colonial history, belief, authorship, material and visual cultures that instruct censorship/propaganda and prevention/repression of anti-colonial thought. I will bring forward a set theoretical frameworks informed by architects, historians, philosophers and theologians, including documents such The Archaeology of Knowledge by Michel Foucault, Powerful Frequencies: Radio, State Power, and the Cold War in Angola, 1931-2002 by Marissa J. Moorman, Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticismby Jane Rendell, Architecture in Black: Theory, Space and Appearance by Darell Wayne Fields, Beauty is a Basic Service: Theology and Hospitality in the Work of Theaster Gates by Maria Fee, and Spatializing Blackness. Architectures of Confinement and Black Masculinity in Chicago by Rashad Shabazz.

Under the banner of the so-called green transition, a global extractivist imperative is being directed at lithium. In its most recent wave across Europe, aligned corporate, and national interests have attempted to impose geographies of extraction that disregard existing socio-environmental relationships, their modes of production and existence. Although atomized, community and activist struggles are firmly contesting such unfair transition and its violent implications: from the mountains of Portugal to the valleys of Serbia. Barroso region, in the north of Portugal, is one of such landscapes of refusal. For the last seven years, a solid resistance to this modality of green extractivism has unveiled crucial lessons of social-environmental organisation and invention. This investigation attempts to unfold the world-sustaining relations behind the anti-extractivist struggle in Barroso. It mobilises a web of environmental testimonies to examine two interrelated conditions: the reemergence of baldios—collectively managed lands—as fundamental material constituents within the current anti-hegemonic struggle; and the socio-environmental relations that emanated from the seven months of daily blockage of the mining company’s excavation machines on these spaces of common possession. Lastly, the project rehearses the emancipatory potential of this investigative practice in rearticulating solidarity across difference, against and in spite of the expanding frontiers of extractive dispossession.

In the early hours of September 11, 2023, two public buildings CCTV recorded the unfolding of storm Daniel and the resulting flooding of the filmed areas in the Libyan coastal city of Derna. After the El Bilad and Bu Mansur Dams collapsed, simulated scenarios depicting a Wadi without their existence challenge their construction after hydrological studies in 1973 and shed light on the Wadi as an essential agent of the local sociocultural fabric unearthing ecological cosmologies around perennial waterways and land stewardship. Beyond the technocapitalist adaptability narrative fetishising the obstruction of the Wadi to manage the seasonal phenomenon of the Wadi Derna Valley, especially in times of ecological and climatic crisis, this event stresses the questioning of their planning and the subsequently forced urban densification of the dried lower plains. Drawing on colonial land reclamation practices and historically accumulated ideologies, policies, and modes of extraction, this paper explores hydrological projects contracting as a tacit modus operandi of coloniality and imperiality across the Libyan territory.

In this talk, interdisciplinary researchers Mhamad Safa (RCA) and Gascia Ouzounian (Oxford) discuss different approaches to ‘counterlistening’: listening against official and hegemonic narratives of contested events, including in the contexts of war and genocide; and listening for sounds and voices that have been occluded and erased, particularly in the aftermath of mass violence. They discuss different approaches to listening as a tactics and mode of resistance in their own work and others, drawing attention to forensic listening projects by Lawrence Abu Hamdan and others; analyzing earwitness testimonies; ‘speculative listening’ (Hartman) to denialist and colonialist archives; and ‘urgent listening’ (Kurda) in times of crisis. The conversation will also reflect on critical approaches to sonic architecture and sonic urbanism, understanding the sonic city as a site of political and social contests and a field in which power relations are expressed and manifested, including in the cases of sonic warfare and atmospheric violence.