ADS2: Rehearsing Life at the End of the World

Occupation, contamination, displacement, and ecological collapse are spatial conditions that constrain life and living across bodies, species, and generations. Emerging at the intersection of global extractive infrastructures and the systemic dispossession of local ecologies and communities, unlivability is where “the most extreme point of human [and non-human] suffering and injustice” occurs. It is not simply a consequence of capitalist development but a designed condition that ensures its continuity and expansion.

And still, marginalised collectivities practice resistance and care in ways that challenge imperial world-making. These are not gestures toward a supposed purity, but rehearsals for life-worlds that make it possible to persist and become otherwise in the aftermath. Cooperative stewardship, solidarity economies, and communal forms of repair enact infrastructures that sustain life from within the ruins, composing the grounds for decolonial, non-extractive futures.

This year, ADS2 will respond to zones rendered uninhabitable by producing architectures that reinforce the alter-worlds emerging from resistant collectivities. It operates with and within human and more-than-human assemblages to build infrastructures of relation that stretch from ancestral pasts into possible futures, offering moments of rupture, reconfiguration, and transformation. Through engagement with transgenerational and more-than-human systems and temporalities, the studio will develop spatial propositions for structural transformations that abolish, uproot, and dismantle oppressive systems.

Student projects will use various sensing methodologies to dissect the inhospitable conditions at studied sites. Not limited to conventional practices of mapping or counter-mapping, sensing is understood not as “a phenomenological encounter between a human body and external set of stimuli” but more so “about particular technologies, concerns, and environmental problems, as well as bodies and politics, concretising into specific occasions that can galvanise citizen sensing in certain ways”.

Following this, ADS2 encourages the use of various imaging and representational methodologies to measure, predict, and map the condensation of atmospheric violence across material and temporal scales. As such, the output are addressed not only as visuals but also as guidelines for design strategies.

Architectural projects will develop from these analyses, engaging with the unconventional yet adaptive spatial practices that marginalised groups craft within hostile environments. Through community activations, sonic atmospheres, urban and/or environmental interventions, and material supply chains, ADS2 will design strategies that resist violence by building infrastructures for the living.

Refusing the comfort of resolution, each project will operate at the scale and temporality of the collectivities it engages, working in situated collaboration with relevant stakeholders such as activists, scientists, community campaigners, and research organisations. Through radical architectural practices that sit off the grids of normative and conventional spatial propositions, each project will propose communal forms of repair that rehearse implausible-yet-real presents – formulating a design practice that reinforces the liberatory alter-worlds nestled in the reality of the now.

The field trip will take place in Venice and Rome. The live project will collaborate with local associations in the UK and Italy on music and listening as abolitionist spaces.

Teaching Day: Thursday

Dr Mhamad Safa is a London-based sound artist and architect whose work explores the intersection of multi-scalar spatial conditions and their sonic make-ups. His practice addresses the aural legacies of traditional subcultures, occultism, armed conflicts, shock, and the aftermath of violence. He graduated from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London in 2019 and received his PhD from the University of Westminster in 2024. He is an Associate Lecturer in Architecture and Media Studies at the Royal College of Art in London. He is a founding partner in Aux.Eye Studios, a sound and music post-production studio.

Lodovica Guarnieri is a designer, researcher, and educator whose work explores the entanglements between ecology and modern infrastructures. Her practice interrogates technoscience in relation to the toxic afterlives of extractivism and colonialism in aquatic environments. She develops counter-pedagogical initiatives and sites in the form of programmes, performances, and networks to envision new imaginaries for socio-environmental justice. Currently, she co-leads The Tidal Garden, a research agency based in Venice (IT) that explores the edible potential of salt-tolerant plants as a tool for cultural adaptation to climate change. She holds an MA from the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London.

Shehrazade Mahassini is an artist, architect, researcher, and educator working at the nexus of architecture, art and curatorial practice. She is the founder of studio:institute, a spatial practice embedded in critical and transdisciplinary research. Parallel to her practice, Shehrazade is a PhD candidate at the School of Architecture, Royal College of Art. Her research focuses on the colonial continuum of water extraction in Libya and the broader SWANA region. Embedded in decolonial studies and Arab and Afro-feminism, her research questions the historicity of space production in former colonies and how it relates to segregated urban spaces in contemporary Western society.