A GATHERING ON THE FUTURE OF AMAZONIA
Architectures and Ecologies of Amazonia will take place at the University of Pennsylvania—an international, interdisciplinary symposium and exhibition that highlights the agencies that have shaped and continue to be shaped by the great region.
In the face of the widespread socio-environmental challenges we currently face, along with the existential threat of crossing the environmental tipping point of the Amazon rainforest, the event seeks to share lessons that the study of Amazonia can teach us about climate action, coexistence, and the built environment. The student exhibition will be held at the Mezzanine Gallery of Meyerson Hall from February 7 to May 1, 2025, and is designed by Penn graduate architecture students Jonathan Bonezzi and Ryan Lane.
Threatened by deforestation, fires, and drought, the Amazon rainforest, which spans nine countries, is home to more than thirty million people. It is the ancestral homeland of more than one million Indigenous peoples and sustains the greatest concentration of biodiversity on Earth. Due to its vastness and status as the last large contiguous tropical rainforest, Amazonia offers a unique lens through which to examine the narratives of the Anthropocene and the critiques surrounding them in contemporary socio-environmental justice debates. The event will consider the past, present, and future of the built environment, focusing on the diversity and coexistence of lives and experiences in the forest, both within and beyond the contexts of the Americas, Latin America, and the Global South.
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Annan Li (MArch), Layers of Development, 2024. Gouache leaf print on paper. Courtesy of Annan Li
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Annan Li (MArch), Layers of Development, 2024. Gouache leaf print on paper. Courtesy of Annan Li
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Annan Li (MArch), Layers of Development, 2024. Gouache leaf print on paper. Courtesy of Annan Li
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Annan Li (MArch), Layers of Development, 2024. Gouache leaf print on paper. Courtesy of Annan Li
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Annan Li (MArch), Layers of Development, 2024. Gouache leaf print on paper. Courtesy of Annan Li
The symposium aims to foster interdisciplinarity by considering different approaches to the relationship between nature and culture in contemporary definitions of design, architecture, landscape architecture, urban planning, and the very notion of the built environment. This will be guided by the socio-ecological practices, agriculture, thought, and activism that discussions about the Amazon rainforest can generate. Indigenous peoples, along with archaeologists and anthropologists who work critically with them, emphasize that the Amazon is a cultural landscape that has been shaped, cultivated, designed, and even urbanized for centuries.
Climate activist, educator, and Amazonian Indigenous leader Vanda Witoto (Instituto Witoto) and philosopher Emanuele Coccia (École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) will be the keynote speakers.
Key discussion topics will include lessons on strengthening ecological diversity through both human and more-than-human forms of construction; forest management, politics, and globalization; water and soil creation (such as terra preta); biodiversity and vernacular environments; as well as cosmology, mythology, cohabitation, and solidarity. These themes will be explored through a critical examination of ancestral and Indigenous cosmologies and forest practices, alongside human and life sciences, as well as aesthetics that have shaped critiques of colonialism, governance, and resource extraction.
These discussions will also engage with the intertwined histories of coloniality, development policies, urbanization, modernization, and industrialization—forces that have displaced countless beings and triggered environmental destruction, including habitat loss, species extinction, and significant shifts in the global climate.
Architectures and Ecologies of Amazonia will take place on February 7, 2025, 9am, at Fisher Fine Arts Library, 4th Floor, 220 South 34th Street, Philadelphia (United States).
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