LEXICON
research + exhibition installation






















lexicon
for
the 2023 Rotterdam Architecture Biennale



Lexicon of practices and thoughts from Brazilian collective Ruinorama, based onencounters with afro-indigenous spatial practices and cosmopolitics.


From A to Z, Ruinorama’s Lexicon intends to share with broader public practices andthoughts based on encounters with afro-indigenous thoughts and cosmopolitics.

Theidea is to compose a lexicon of concepts with entries that elucidate and instigateradical other reflections within the field of architecture and urbanism based on theexperiences, trajectories and research of the members of our Brazilian collective.

The Lexicon is presented to the public as a clearing, surrounded by stacks ofpaper with shuffled entries, and with a blank upper face. We think about the body'scirculating through space to access information on blank pages as something new tobe discovered, without preconceptions, in an oracular manner and without control.The entries will be organized from A to Z, with at least one concept and abrief related text for each word, constituting a galaxy of ideas that permeate ourthinking and practicing.

The texts will be composed as short essays, with differentpossibilities of genres and resources (such as images and quotes), and will alsopresent the references related to our own published works, as a manner of sharingour reflections as a collective in a more direct and objective way – more as an index,or a guide, than as a library.

For now, imagine examples of entries such as A for Allyship, D for Decay, Efor Encounter, H for Humus, I for Impermanence, K for Kin, and V for Vital.

Each ofthe entries intend to promote a destabilizing effect in current practices and unsettlenormative conceptions of architects and urbanists, as it is conceived as a “broadtranscultural compilation of concrete concepts, worldviews, and practices (...)challenging the modernist ontology of universalism in favor of a multiplicity ofpossible words”, quoting one of our main references, the book “Pluriverse – APost-Development Dictionary” edited in 2019 by Arturo Escobar, Alberto Acosta, andothers.

The Lexicon, therefore, proposes to establish a new semantic set of wordsand perspectives for architects, in a way that is attentive to the decolonization ofarchitecture, in chorus with what the counter-colonialist and quilombola thinker NegoBispo proposes as a "war of denominations".




curators
Saskia van Stein, Janna Bystrykh, Catherine Koekoek, Alina Paias, Hani Salih, Noortje Weenink 


year
2024




Installation at the 
Rotterdam 2023 Architecture Biennale
“Nature of Hope”


by

Ruinorama

Beatrice Perracini
Eleonora Aronis
Guilherme Paschoal
Iazana Guizzo
Laura Pappalardo
Nathalie Ventura
Rodrigo Messina
Thiago Benucci
Wellington Cançado


Ruinorama is a collective from Brazil with members from different Brazilian states and universities, that approaches the anthropocene, the multispecies studies, and the afro-indigenous cosmopolitics from the perspective of architecture and urbanism to reflect on the implications of these practices for the extensive planetary transformations and ecological collapse, and to speculate on possible modes of regeneration of environmental protection, historical reparations and care for the e/Earth.

www.ruinorama.org









photos: Jacqueline Fuijkschot








lexicon
exhibition installation
for Rotterdam 2023 Biennale