Dawn is close. A thick layer of mist lingers a few inches above the ground in a patch of dense tropical forest near Hopelchén, the place of the five sinkholes. The air is humid and fat with dew; it smells of cold ashes and smoke, rotting leaves, mushrooms, moss, mud. A thin ray of light starts to make its way through the lush foliage of a gigantic ya’axche, the sacred ceiba (or kapok) tree. Its solid bark has the texture of grey elephant skin. It marks the center of the cosmos, the axis of life and death. Next to it lean the remains of a lifeless tree. A shiny black centipede crawls down and disappears in the ground into the bowels of Xibalbá, the underworld. Rustling sounds of biped footsteps approach, then stop. Two fingers, a thumb and an index, are inserted into a small hole in the trunk; they wiggle around like blind pigeons and then pinch. A blob of syrupy substance starts oozing out, leaving a trail of golden stickiness along its downward path. A buzzing sound fills the air and intensifies rapidly around the hole: the angry protest of a six-legged, stingless sentinel. The jícara is full of honey. Footsteps recede into the background. Silence returns to the forest. The sun is out, bathing the treetops and the creatures that dawdle and play on them. Bright red bromelias, white orchids and cobalt blue morning glories growing in all sorts of height-defying postures soak in the sunrays while a few xunan-kaab, stingless honeybees also known as Melipona beecheii Bennett, dance on their pistils brimming with pollen and nectar. The buzz of their flightpaths pierces the atmosphere of the forest, crisscrossing it like invisible spiderwebs. Inside the hollow tree trunk, in the xjobón che, an intraworld of exquisite spatial patterns, fractal recesses, cavities and chambers filled with pungent fragrances and substances is being generated with the incessant batting of delicate wings and biochemical reactions. The hive, a sort of entelechy or superorganism, is the interior of an insect matriarchy, a “queendom,” that has perfected the reproductive technologies necessary for the continuation of its own gene pool and its expansion in future colonies. It produces legions and swarms of specialized courtesan subjects: consorts, soldiers, drones, builders, workers, foragers, harvesters, caretakers, nannies. They provide the energetic conditions that make possible the perpetual production of a territory, and the surplus nutrients upon which their existence rests. Kaab is the word that encapsulates this palynivore world; in its patterned arrangements and rich, waxy modulations the flows of energy and matter are articulated across time and space.@en

Michel Foucault’s problematic concept of heterotopia has traveled extensively across discursive domains over the past five decades, influencing how we think about spatial difference. In postmodern discourse, however, it tends to be extrapolated to encompass socio-cultural difference, where it is read as an expression of empancipatory, deviant or contestatory potential. This infuses the concept with a sort of liberatory or utopian character, which it does not have. On the other hand, many accounts analyze specific spatial arrangements or places that stand out for their heterogeneity as ‘case studies’ of heterotopia, which are then described quite literally according to the six principles of the ‘heterotopian toolbox’. The results are often disappointingly vacuous, flat descriptions that fail to elucidate the processes and relations through which difference emerges in the first place. In this chapter I argue that what these interpretations miss is the opportunity of thinking and theorizing spatial difference otherwise, namely, heterotopologically. Like theory itself, heterotopia is unstable, ‘undisciplined’. It shuns classification and categories; its inherent ambivalence and plasticity allow it to resist and escape capture. When freed from rigid or conventional readings, the concept transgresses discursive and disciplinary boundaries, forcing us to problematize, to question, to experiment, and especially to think differently about space. In this chapter I join the emerging voices of scholars who are calling for the formulation of heterotopian alliances and collaborations among a host of disciplinary fields, activism, and the arts around the problematics of spatial difference: the call for a heterotopia unbound. Keywords: heterotopology, un/disciplinarity, spatial difference, thinking otherwise @en

Various forms of violence and conflict continue to shape our habitats. What historically has been straightforward and even obvious two-way dependency, in recent years took more subtle and covert form due to sophisticated technological advancements in the fields of media, surveillance and armament. Recognising the detrimental effects of these new developments on the way we experience, conceptualise and build our environments, Footprint27 proposes artistic reflections, cross-media inquiry and counter-tactics as new powerful tools to rethink the complex relationship between conflict, space and mediation. On one hand, the aim of this issue is to deepen and expand theoretical considerations that substantiate investigations of spatial conflicts by making them truly interdisciplinary. On the other, it seeks to empower architects and artists in their pursuit of exposing, critiquing and fighting spatial violence by reclaiming/unlocking the enormous potential of media tools.@en

This chapter addresses the problematic aesthetic category of ‘the ugly’ as applied to architecture and other phenomena of sensory perception through the equally problematic cultural category of ‘the monster’. The ugly and the monster both occupy marginal positions in the production of knowledge, where they both tend to be trivialized, dispatched as a simple matter of (bad) taste or a fancy of the imagination. They certainly have received only peripheral attention in contemporary architectural discourse. The ugly and the monster, however, recur in the arts and in popular culture, spilling over into aesthetic theory and cultural analysis alike, where they are not considered frivolous categories. They are relevant precisely because of their marginal, uncomfortable status: unresolved, undefined, ambivalent, unfinished or ‘grotesque’, continuously transforming. They are essentially unclassifiable, and this resistance alone is what has kept thinkers busy trying to capture and describe some of their formal or structural...
@en

Conflict, when dislodged from its conventional understanding as a process and system of war and destruction exclusively, may be apprehended as an experimental method for analysis and synthesis, as a potent resource for pedagogy, for disruptive design and for the production of theory. In this sense, conflict produces more than the eradication of (the possibility of) life and its supporting structures: conflict produces transitional spaces at different scales, of differentiated material ecologies and site-specific meanings in relation to their global position. Conflicts are both locations and explanations of often ‘seductive’ images of destruction offered by popular (and other) media: ruined architectures, dead (or barely alive) bodies, forced migratory movements, impermanent infrastructures and settlements, as well as the tracing and construction of borders, real-estate driven post-war reconstruction processes, etc.@en

The phenomenon of migration is a fundamental concept to evolutionary biology, population studies, and life sciences. It is almost uncontestable common knowledge that migration is an indispensable factor to propel difference and change, thus ensuring genetic variation, and ultimately evolution for all life forms. For most species migration is the rule, not the exception. Yet, when referring to human migration, the discussions suddenly turn highly controversial. Underpinning the expected arguments that tie these discussions to human exceptionalism and speciesism, one encounters the deeply rooted links of sedentarism to diverse projects of State formation, the construction of society and its cultural and territorial arrangements into bounded, legible schemes and models. Arguably, a narrowing vision, which simultaneously claims to capture and organize an otherwise complex and messy reality, is a necessary and effective frame to focus on particular forms of knowledge over and against others. Nevertheless, as is increasingly evident, such narrow frames not only simplify, but also reduce reality, offering static, fixed and schematic falsifications of it, removed as it were, from the actual phenomena to which they allude. Human migration is especially prone to the effects of such simplification, leading to a reduced understanding of the migration phenomenon itself, the multiple agents which emerge from it and that shape it, and their relationality as constitutive of a milieu, or metabolism. For migration, this has a paralyzing effect, as it limits and compartamentalizes the capacity to act in relation to it. Other discursive schemes (of subject formation) that allow us to think and act differently, creatively and critically in relation to migration are paramount, especially if the intentionality is to physically intervene within it. In other words, migration and migrant agents, when liberated from the grasp of conventionally reductive and simplifying frames, reveal their intricate participation in an ecology that not only engenders the becoming of form, space, matter and subjectivity, but which also shapes specifically human practices and relations. In short, understanding migration as a complex assemblage driven by desire and other, previously unseen forces is to regard it as a process of becoming. Seen from this angle, concepts conventionally associated to human migration –from migrating subjects, territories, borders, to structures and systems-, become fields of latent potentiality and productive possibilities. It is at this juncture when –perhaps appropriately so- we may begin exercising different forms of nomadic thought when dealing with migration. The paper contribution departs from the premise that different theoretical and discursive frameworks are necessary to rethink and act upon the very urgent problem of human migration from a metabolic, relational and systemic point of view. It will do so by introducing and explaining an unconventional approach in which three different ‘logics’ will encounter each other in an attempt to recalibrate the reach of the spatial disciplines and material practices, in particular architecture, within the phenomenon of contemporary human migration: population thinking, intensive thinking and topological thinking. @en

Contemporary commoning practices are emerging from the failure of a vast array of neoliberal systems and models. Arguably, these practices hold the potential to actualise an in-between niche, which the public and private domains alike have been unable to encompass and express. As such, they invite us to rethink the meaning of the public/private dichotomy. Commoning practices simultaneously respond and give rise to differentiated social and materials forms and relationships, which result in a variety of geopolitical ecologies and new understandings of citizenry.

Issue 16 of Footprint offers an array of diverse insights into contemporary commoning practices. Emanating from different angles of enquiry and theoretical perspectives the articles included here investigate the question of the commons through the re-conceptualisation of different subjectivities. New understandings of the empowering potentials and latent agency of self-organised urban movements, i.e., are approached by means of in-depth analysis and critical assessment. The spectrum of possibilities opened by differentiated political practices and strategies unveil renewed types of legitimacy. Furthermore, critical evaluations of spatial initiatives display emerging socio-spatial bodies, thus questioning the role of autonomy across a spectrum of scales and thresholds of negotiation. Ultimately, the analysis of and speculation on the mechanisms of contemporary commoning re-configure urban reality through the realisation of new materialities.@en