Architecture & Ethnography Seminar

The Centre Production of Space has taken part, since its founding, in the International Architecture and Ethnography Seminar — the venue where the Lefebvrian triad that organises our lines of research (perceived, conceived, and lived space) is tested against other disciplines and returns transformed into new research questions. The link is not a formality: it is evidence that researching the production of space requires stepping outside architecture's own disciplinary field.

For the CPE, the Seminar works as a two-way channel. On one hand, it allows us to bring into our research agenda, at an early stage, discussions that do not yet have an established place in Chilean architecture — cosmotechnics, situated ontologies, the sensory turn in spatial studies — before they turn into articles, FONDECYT projects, or new lines of work at the Centre. On the other, it offers an exit: a space where the CPE's findings are exposed to conversation with anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, and urbanists from other latitudes, before being consolidated into indexed publications.

Beyond its theoretical value, the Seminar is one of the CPE's main mechanisms of public engagement: edition after edition, it sustains a fluid and constant relationship with the national and international academic community, with invited researchers, and with an audience that extends well beyond architecture into anthropology, geography, and urban studies.

About the Seminar

The International Architecture and Ethnography Seminar emerged as a transdisciplinary meeting space to rethink the relationships between space, culture, and technique.

Since its first edition, the seminar has situated itself within an emerging field of research that seeks to articulate the material and human dimensions of dwelling — what Albena Yaneva called architecture's ethnographic turn. This perspective was consolidated in 2018, when Momoyo Kaijima presented the framework of Architectural Ethnography at the Japan Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, opening new possibilities for representing places through drawings and diagrams capable of unsettling hierarchies between humans and non-humans, and of capturing the textures of everyday life.

In its first edition, the seminar focused on exploring how architectural research — historically anchored in technical and quantitative representation — could be enriched by ethnographic tools, reconciling it with its social nature and strengthening its critical thinking. The second gathering broadened this outlook by incorporating images, sounds, and situated biographies, emphasising the role of the senses in the epistemology of the socio-spatial and convening researchers from different disciplines — architecture, anthropology, geography, urbanism, and sociology — within a single field of discussion. The third edition embraced the sensory turn in spatial studies, acknowledging partiality and the weight of bodies in being-in-place. From there, it was assumed that architecture cannot be detached from embodied, affective, and situated experience, and that ethnography offers a set of methods for accessing those dimensions of dwelling that conventional metrics tend to render invisible.

This new edition sets out to revisit cosmotechnics in Latin America, exploring their epistemic, political, and aesthetic dimensions from a situated standpoint. Following Yuk Hui, we understand that “technology is not anthropologically universal; the technologies of different cultures are affected by these cultures' cosmological conceptions and are autonomous only within a given cosmological environment: technics is always cosmotechnics” (Hui, 2024: 34–35). From this perspective, architecture cannot be thought of as a merely neutral application of constructive techniques, but as a practice deeply rooted in cultural ways of understanding, dwelling in, and transforming the world. Hui proposes understanding cosmotechnics as “the unification of the cosmic order and the moral order through technical activities,” which challenges the functionalist and universalist notions that still prevail in much contemporary architectural practice.

Within this framework, we are interested in revisiting the discussions raised by anthropologists such as Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who have drawn on Amazonian cosmologies as a way of questioning the nature–culture divide so deeply rooted in the Western tradition (Hui, 2024: 38). Architecture, as both a technical and a cultural practice, is challenged by these other ways of thinking about the relationship between matter, spirit, and territory. The Architecture & Ethnography Seminar thus opens itself to imagining and discussing spatial practices that emerge from other ontological regimes, from other cosmotechnics, offering situated alternatives for rethinking architecture in relation to dwelling, knowledge, and the Earth in Latin America.

Questions guiding this edition

• How can architecture open itself to other ways of thinking about technique, beyond the functionalist and productivist frameworks inherited from modernity?
• How can ethnography help unravel the situated techniques that articulate cosmologies, materials, and ways of life?
• What happens when architecture is thought of not as a universal technical answer, but as a situated practice?
• Can architecture become a means of recomposing links between technique, ethics, and territory in contexts crossed by the planetary crisis?