Following a welcome message by Jean-Pierre Greff and Claire Baribaud, respectively directors of HEAD and HEPIA, the Archipelago broadcast began by challenging the assumption that disciplinary concerns within interiors, architecture and landscape always need material intervention, which brought forward the question Do We Need to Build?. In a roundtable discussion with members of the Archipelago advisory board, which included the architecture, interior architecture and landscape architecture Heads of Department at HEAD and HEPIA, the first conversation set the tone for the days to come by touching upon the processes of institution building and public engagement, as well as shifting modes of pedagogy. This was followed by a tour of the scenography with members of the design team, to understand the intentions behind its many locally sourced, reusable parts.

On the second day – entitled Understories – What Remains Hidden in Plain View? – the broadcast turned to under-represented knowledge, systems and stories that have been canonically excluded. The day’s programme began with Territories of Intervention, a discussion of the local urban context of Geneva that looked outwards to the rest of Switzerland, its borders and beyond, questioning how the city is entangled in larger myths of nationality and place. It continued with Extractive Systems that sought to unearth systems and traces of capitalism, imperialism, extractivism by exposing and challenging forms of embedded exploitation. Panellists contended with extraction and its spectrum of interpretation, as well as the need to deconstruct the “architecture saviour complex”. From this, the broadcast moved to Other Stories, i.e. narratives within architecture, landscape and interior design that are traditionally positioned at the margin, ones that are either newly visible or which are there from the very beginning. The conversation ended with a charge to reimagine hegemonic narratives as the “other” and by doing so, finding new disciplinary centre points. The final conversation of Day 2 zoomed out and considered stories that play out on a global scale, ones that involve multiple material flows across time and space.

The third day of the Archipelago broadcast (Interdependency – New Disciplinary Narratives) focused on new methods and models to develop practice. Kinship and Advocacy opened this topic by unpacking the way in which disciplinary boundaries and expectations change when kinship, collaboration and mutual care are centred. Panellists related personal experience to their work and discussed the role that shared ritual plays in fostering kinship. Working With then continued this conversation by exploring how practitioners are changing the ways they work with one another within the complex present, allowing for experimental collective configurations that offer new possibilities for interdisciplinary exchange. Archipelago’s conversations ended with New Roles, New Practices, which sought to build upon the previous three days of insights, to imagine new paths for architects, landscape architects and interior designers. The event concluded with a roundtable discussion where students from HEAD and HEPIA came together with the Archipelago moderators to reflect on how these new disciplinary paths might be carved within the educational institution, leading to future generations of practitioners attuned to the complex contemporary issues we are facing.

Alongside the broadcast, Archipelago was enriched by a layer of workshops, which allowed participants in Geneva and all over the world to partake in a parallel exploration of themes that were central to the event. Many of these workshops were selected following Archipelago’s call for papers that invited students of architectural disciplines to offer their contributions. The workshop took place online with sessions exploring the conflated realms of physical and digital realities, the creation of new worldviews through maintenance and repair and new ways to co-exist and care for each other from the human to the microbial level. It also took place  on-site in Geneva with outdoor activities allowing participants to engage with the city and their surroundings in diverse ways – either by exploring the city’s “archipelagic” dimensions, engaging with traces of climate crisis in our direct surroundings or imagining the city anew, starting from its fragments.

Archipelago could not have been the intense and fruitful experience it was without the participation of all of the panellists, workshop leaders, filmmakers and moderators both in-person and virtually. It could not have happened without the efforts of the production team, the scenography team and the staff at HEAD. The Archipelago Team would also like to thank the students and faculty members of both HEAD and HEPIA who have been key to the event since its conception. Thank you to all who helped to chart a path forward and to draw the lines of a new archipelago.

Archipelago
May 6–8, 2021
Broadcast live from Geneva
Featuring conversations with: Pooja Agrawal, Céline Baumann, Ila Bêka & Louise Lemoine, Sofia Pia Belenky, Luca Cei, Esther Choi, Collectif Galta, Trojans Collective, Cynthia Deng, Cindy Duan, Matias Echanove, Elif Erez, Javier F. Contreras, Marco Ferrari, Silvia Franceschini, Nathalie Frankowski, Emma-Julia Fuller, Cruz Garcia, Rania Ghosn, Natacha Guillaumont, Jane Mah Hutton, Emma Kaufmann-LaDuc, Youri Kravtchenko, Adrian Lahoud, Léopold Lambert, Romain Legros, Ann Lui, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, Oreste Montinaro, Lauro Nächt, Joar Nango, Marina Otero, Mariana Pestana, Nicolas Pham, Lucia Pietroiusti, Marie-Louise Richards, Francesco Sebregondi, Riccardo Simioni, Serina Tarkhanian, Justinien Tribillon, Charlotte Truwant, Manijeh Verghese, Daniel Zamarbide, and others.