Re-enchantments
Toward Relational Architectural Futures
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.59490/footprint.20.1.8908Abstract
Footprint 38 positions Africa as a site for thinking and theorising worlds to come. Drawing on Achille Mbembe’s understanding of re-enchantment as a mode of restoring relational vitality and imaginative possibility, the issue gathers a collection of situated writings that explore forms of attachment and worlding across African peoples, places, and objects. This editorial interprets these contributions through the framework of relational ontologies, identifying and tracing the transversal theoretical and methodological resonances which inform the four overlapping and interweaving thematic lines of the issue: infrastructural futuring, diasporic subjectivities, speculative futuring, and cosmotechnical relationalities. Across these interpretive trajectories, the conceptual and material foundations of our field are reworked. Architecture emerges as an assemblage-in-becoming, a mode of re-enchantment, through which socio-ecological, technical, economic, and political relations are activated and mediated.
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