Transitional Territories Lecture Series—After Territory—Session 3

The Transitional Territories lecture series explores the agency of design as a mode of investigation and reflexive transformation of the ever-changing interrelations between natural processes, societal practices, and (geo)political frameworks. This special session aims to unpack relationships between climate, capitalism, and the global hinterland question.

The 2022-2023 edition marks the end of a cycle of investigations of the Transitional Territories research group and graduation studio on the Inland-Seaward topic. Jointly with the Water Landscapes of Crisis and Hope Studio and under the provocative title After Territory it aims to bring together perspectives from urban and landscape theory, critical media, and design to explore spatial approaches and concepts that can help decipher material processes of anthropogenic transformation of the earth across scales. The series aspires to offer critical insights into the state and agency of the territorial project within the pressing context of the climate crisis and the associated social and ecological tensions.

Speakers include:

Milica Topalovic, ETHZ
Stephan Petermann, MANN
Dehlia Hannah, University of Copenhagen
Jeff Diamanti, University of Amsterdam

This event takes place within the framework of:

TU Delft
Section of Urban Design
Delta Urbanism Research Group
Graduation Studio—Transitional Territories

Section of Landscape Architecture
Graduation Studio—Water Landscapes of Crisis and Hope

Special session curated by:
Nikos Katsikis, Victor Muñoz Sanz and Taneha Kuzniecow Bacchin

Milica Topalovic—After Monoculture: Repair in Agriterritories

Milica Topalović is Associate Professor of Architecture and Territorial Planning at the Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich. Her work is concerned with territories beyond-the-city and transformation processes they are exposed to, through the movement of capital, social restructuring, and environmental change. With Architecture of Territory group she undertook a range of territorial studies around the world, in remote regions, resource hinterlands, and countrysides, in an effort to decenter and ecologize architect’s approaches to the city, the urban, and urbanization.

Her work has been published in various international journals and books, including Harvard Design Magazine, New Geographies, and Architectural Design. She has coauthored Belgrade. Formal Informal (2012), The Inevitable Specificity of Cities (2015), and Constructed Land. Singapore 1924–2012 (2014). A book Extended Urbanisation. Territories, Processes, Struggles coedited with Christian Schmid is forthcoming (2023).

Stephan Petermann—Dirty Hands

Stephan Petermann holds a Master’s degree in the History of Architecture and the Theory of Building Preservation from the Utrecht University (2001-2007) and studied Architecture at the Eindhoven University of Technology (2001-2005). From 2006 onwards he was a long-term collaborator of Rem Koolhaas assisting him with research, strategy, editing and curation. He was an associate at OMA’s thinktank AMO from 2010 until 2019. In 2019 he founded MANN with Marieke van den Heuvel.

Since 2019 he is a visiting professor at the Central Academy of Fine Arts’ Visual Arts Innovation Center in Beijing. In 2019 he founded MANN, a research and creative design consultancy in Amsterdam working with a variety of private clients and public organizations on strategy, concept and content development in real estate development, food and agriculture, and technology. In February 2020 he presented Chinese Villages: A new Era as part of the Countryside.The Future exhibition by Rem Koolhaas/AMO at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York done as a result of a four-year collaboration with the CAFA Visual Arts Innovation Center in Beijing looking at the future of the Chinese countryside. Since the Summer of 2021 he is the editor-in-chief of VOLUME, a magazine devoted to architecture, design and anything else that comes in its path.  In the Fall of 2022 with Ruth Baumeister and Marieke van den Heuvel he published Back to the Office with NAI010 Publishers.

Dehlia Hannah—Plant Criticism

Dehlia Hannah Ph.D. is a philosopher and curator based at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen. In September 2023 she will join the faculty of the Department of Arts and Cultural Sciences at the University of Copenhagen as Associate Professor of Environmental Aesthetics. Her current project Rewilding the Museum examines the art museum’s status within the fragile ecologies of the Anthropocene. She is the editor of include Julius von Bismarck — Talking to Thunder (Hatje Cantz, 2019) and Julian Charrière—Toward No Earthly Pole (Mousse, 2020), and the Routledge Handbook of Art and Science and Technology Studies (Routledge, 2021). Selected as one the New York Times’ Best Art Books of 2019, her volume A Year Without a Winter (Columbia University Press, 2018) reframes contemporary imaginaries of climate change by revisiting the environmental conditions under which Frankenstein was written and the global aftermath of the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora. Curated with Nadim Samman, her current exhibition Julian Charriere—Controlled Burn is on view at the Langen Foundation in Germany until August, 2023.

Jeff Diamanti—Inorganic Capital

Jeff Diamanti is Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at the University of Amsterdam. His first book, Climate and Capital in the Age of Petroleum was published on Bloomsbury in 2021. He is co-director of the FieldARTS arts and research residency in Amsterdam.