#Operaciones
#cement/concrete
#xenotaph
Xenotaph: On the Phylogenesis and Will of Calcium Carbonate
Operaciones
27/03/2026
Editing
Author: Dorian Z. Bell
Xenotaph: On the Phylogenesis and Will of Calcium Carbonate traces the strange life of putatively dead matter —concrete, limestone, calcium carbonate— as it organizes worlds, architectures, ecologies, and meanings. It follows how materials that predate us and will outlast us fold into metabolic loops, political abstractions, machine logics, and traumatic repetitions, sedimenting into the carbonaceous grammar of the Anthropocene.
From cathedral vaults to ribosomes, from karst to capital, from machine learning circuits to prion misfolding, Xenotaph maps a shared ontology of processes that escalate, replicate, occlude, and dissolve. Concrete becomes not just a substance but an evolutionary strategy, a hyperobject whose surface-area appetites and entropic compulsions shape cities, climates, and forms of thought. What emerges is a theory of nonlife behaving as life, a mineral epistemology in which architectures learn, images ossify, and information mutates; a theory of the world’s ongoing lithification; an exploration of how matter learns, dreams, scars, and builds through us.
#Operaciones
#formaytrabajo
#trabajovivo
Arquitectura genérica y trabajo vivo. Vol. 2. La logística toma el mando
Operaciones
27/03/2026
Editorial direction, Editorial design
Author: Francesco Marullo
Drawing on the treatises of Serlio and Dürer, Logistics Takes Command revisits the work of Oswald Matthias Ungers and the Archizoom Associati group, prominent figures in 20th-century architectural culture who understood, almost clairvoyantly, the influence of logistics and the circulation of goods and knowledge as one of the most ubiquitous spatial technologies of the contemporary world: non-scalar, unbridled, calculating, ruthless, and generic, logistics—linked to Renaissance military speculation in the 16th and 17th centuries, the transnational economy of the 19th century, war as an eminently infrastructural technology of the 20th century, and the warehouses of the 21st century—has shaped the architecture of the city and reached the knowledge factory of the university. In this second installment of the trilogy Arquitectura Genérica y Trabajao Vivo, Marullo exposes architecture as a form of logistics and logistics as the art of class warfare, and points to the urgent need to update the categories through which the politics of space and the role of architecture are thought about, that of those who practice it and, especially, that of those who—through economic, military, and institutional means—have put them at the service of their precarious imagination.
#envhum
#rogue
#cementconcrete
#PCBnA
Inversiones materiales e imágenes de una violencia
—súper– lenta Arquia Foundation Blog - Project edited by Bartlebooth (Pablo Ibáñez and Antonio Giraldez)
5/nov/2025Videoessay
w/ Javier Peña and Luis Alejandro Sáchez Rivera Ecoplanet™, the trade name for Holcim cement, is not the name of a processed product, but rather an entry point into a hyperprocess whose extremely slow development can be observed at high speed on a single bay leaf, serving as a miniature model of a dispute over the planet's surface: the confrontation between contemporary life and life millions of years ago, configured as a layer of material composed of the calcareous structures of marine microfauna bodies, deposited on the seabed and compacted at depth before their necromass was raised in the form of limestone by tectonic action, brought to the surface, exhumed, pulverized, clinkerized, and dispersed, reburied as foundations, eroded, and settled again on the earth, foreshadowing a new alkaline soil, or repopulating the surface of the planet, escaping in the form of dust clouds, released for barely a minute at a time. See more ↗
#envhum
Entrevista a Ana María Durán Calisto
Commission for “Post-extractivist imaginaries. Ecotopias at the cultural limits of the global climate emergency. / Imaginarios post-extractivistas. Ecotopías en los límites culturales de la emergencia climática global,” Biennale di Venezia. Intelligens. Natural. Artificial. Collective. Arsenale di Venezia, (10 may. - 23. nov.) - Project byGabriel Visconti Stopello and Maximillian Nowotka (Eds.)
12/may/2025Interview (Chapter)
w/ Ana María Durán Calisto
This interview with Ana María Durán Calisto probes the experimental, failed, and reimagined futures of Amazonian territorial design. We examine how aerial views—once instruments of conquest and extractivist planning—can also unearth buried Indigenous infrastructures and lifeways. Reflecting on immersive pedagogies with Siekopai communities, Durán Calisto points to the centrality of the chakra and cocha as ecological and epistemic units of planning, rooted in more-than-human relations. Amazonian highways and titling regimes emerge as technologies that fragment and decommunalize territory, raising the question: what forms of property, design, and governance persist when official plans are abandoned or collapse? Rather than lament the “cemetery of planning,” this conversation asks what might be exhumed—technologies, imaginaries, or cosmopolitical insights—from its ruins. Can architectural education and planning practices assimilate the rhythms, timescales, and values of the rainforest? And what if the jungle itself were the one planning? See more ↗
#eHTC #cementconcrete #envhum
#rogue
#PCBnA
Investigación desde abajo. Violencia lenta y disputa por la superficie de una hoja
Edumeet 4 “Ecotopies.” International Conference of Architecture and Transdisciplinarity 2024. Departamento de Proyectos Arquitectónicos, Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM); Centro Producción del Espacio / Núcleo de Lenguaje y Creación, Universidad de las Américas (UDLA)
04/23/24Writing
w/ Luis Alejandro Sánchez Rivera
For a year, the Experiments in
History, Theory, and Criticism program (eHTC) developed an initial
theoretical, ecological, and political framework surrounding the special
environments related to limestone mining and cement production, focusing on a
Holcim processing plant in Costa Rica. This article contextualizes the
fieldwork conducted in a forest adjacent to the factory, the collection of
samples, and the creation of a photographic archive discussed in 9 collective researches
presented under the title Paisajes de
Cementación y Biografías no autorizadas (Landscapes of Cementation and Unauthorized Biographies or PCBnA, by
its acronym in Spanish, 2023-2024). This article analyzes archive documents
through the conceptual, technical, and aesthetic frameworks of slow violence (Rob Nixon), visual and
material representation (Susan Schuppli, Hannah Meszaros Martin), speculating
on their potential as a miniature, accelerated model of the ongoing contest
between contemporary life and non-living materials for the surface of the
planet. Ultimately, this article contextualizes the collective academic research
PCBnA –and its continuation as para-academic research– in the face of the
agencies of corporate and academic power against which it was developed, and
highlights the importance of a research-from-below approach to pedagogical practices in architecture. [Translated excerpt] See more ↗
#Operaciones
#formaytrabajo
#trabajovivo
Arquitectura genérica y trabajo vivo. Vol. I Delirante equivalencia
Operaciones
04/23/24Editorial direction, Editorial designDelirante Equivalencia is the first volume of a trilogy investigating crucial moments in the relationship between labor struggle, architecture, and abstraction from the acceleration of capitalist exchange, financial speculation, and military expansion in 15th-16th century Florence vis-à-vis the rise of new architectural typologies for bureaucracy and management; to the Soviet experiments of collective forms and social condensers in the 1920s; to Rem Koolhaas’ translation of Ivan Leonidov’s visionary modernism into the notion of ‘typical plan’ within the neoliberal context of the 1980s. [Translated excerpt] See more↗
#Operaciones
#formaytrabajo
Abstracción reificada. Notas para una historia de la abstracción en arquitectura
Operaciones
2022Editorial direction
Abstracción, reificada compiles Pier Vittorio Aureli's writings on abstraction from the past decade, proposing a thesis that shifts the understanding of abstraction in art and architecture beyond stylistic and formal terms to a broader sociopolitical context. Aureli refutes the idea of abstraction as a 20th-century artistic movement, demonstrating how practices such as geometry, measurement, drawing, and design have influenced architectural production throughout history. He argues that architectural abstraction has served capitalist logic, turning everything into commodities. Aureli challenges contemporary architects to reconsider their roles and commitments within and against this mode of production. [Translated excerpt] See more↗
#Operaciones
#forensicmet
#envhumHorizontes rosados. Arquitecturas vivientes de una nube tóxica
Operaciones
2021
Editing
Escalas temporales y espaciales de una ecología resiliente. Entrevista a Rosa Whiteley
Interview (Chapter); translation
w/ Rosa Whiteley
This book develops an understanding of how a molecule or a small entity can represent a much larger environmental situation, how a fungus can symbolize the idea of a resilient ecology, and how a particle of toxic aerosol can represent a type of politics and consumer economy. It especially focuses on how interactions at minute scales can introduce enough negative feedback loops to ultimately dismantle extractive financial systems. [Translated from excerpt] See more↗
Horizontes rosados features
–as an epilogue–
an interview between Carlos Segura and Rosa Whiteley that examines the entanglements between atmospheric contamination, global politics, and architectural practice from a multiscalar, non-anthropocentric perspective. Whiteley reflects on how state and corporate actors shape toxic environments less through explicit policy than through material economies –particularly metal extraction and smelting– whose effects exceed the temporal and territorial frameworks of climate governance. Rejecting dichotomies such as nature/culture and state/corporation, the conversation foregrounds atmospheres, bodies, and nonhuman agents as sites of action and resistance. It proposes an architectural practice capable of moving between microscopic and planetary scales, engaging metabolism, toxicity, and multispecies ecologies without projecting totalizing models of environmental control.
#Operaciones
#forensicmet
#envhumDefoliando el mundo. Ecocidio, evidencia visual y ‘tierra memoria’
Operaciones
2020Editorial direction, Editorial design
Defoliando el mundo offers a look at the production of contemporary images about one of the most traditional themes in art –that of landscape– while questioning the notion of this genre as one that has been abandoned by artists, recognized as outdated and romantic, and approached for a long time from technical-pragmatic, ahistorical and apolitical approaches through the exhibition and criticism of existing ways of visualizing nature. Such viewing modes involve a look not only at what is shown through the image, but also at its opaque surface. It starts the publication of a series dedicated to #meteorologiaforense, which analyzes the scope of representation techniques and the historical, legal and economic frameworks of what is suspended -and circulates- in the air, between the sky and the earth; in a practical and eminently spatial sense: it examines the art of deploying bodies -in this case, chemicals- in space, the mechanisms that put it into action and the ways in which it is projected, simultaneously exposing the administration of air as a infrastructural technology and the earth –and what is on its surface– as a potential legal subject and a public sign of order. [Translated excerpt] See more↗
#Operaciones
#opuscules
Orden y rapto de la valla publicitaria
Operaciones
2022Editorial direction
The problem of placing the structure of a common billboard alongside the classical orders of architecture is not its historical gap, but its ordering criterion. The module by which each of the classical orders is proportionally constructed can be employed as an analytical method to examine the billboard with architectural precision in qualitative terms. That the module of the classical orders responds to an aesthetic criterion and not a utilitarian one, as in the billboard, does not imply a contradiction, but rather a contrast. One must refer to the billboard’s material, its form, its disposition, and its design in order to assess whether it has attained this status without the architectural discipline knowing or acknowledging it. If so, this text would be merely informative; if not, it would be dangerously propositional. [Translated excerpt] See more↗