Columbia Books on Architecture and the City with SPACES
Columbia Books on Architecture and the City (CBAC) is pleased to announce an editorial intervention and ongoing collaboration with SPACES, the commissioner of the US Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition at the 2023 Venice Biennale under the theme Everlasting Plastics.
The first iteration of this project, entitled Sketches on Everlasting Plastics, will accompany the exhibition to unfold a discursive map of the histories, urgencies, relations, and preoccupations attendant to the show. Sketches explores the infinite ways in which plastic permeates our bodies and our world. The project offers intimate and political accounts of our fraught relationships with the material that, rather than making a case for or against plastic, attempts to register our ongoing relationships to it, its impact on material cultures, and the harm and possibilities it entangles for our collective futures.
Edited by Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt and Joanna Joseph of CBAC, the publication includes contributions by Tizziana Baldenebro, Kristen Bos, K. Jake Chakasim, Sky Cubacub, Heather Davis, Jennifer Gabrys, Stephanie Ginese, Aurelia Guo, Adam Hanieh, Ilana Harris-Babou, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Carolyn L. Kane, Laleh Khalili, Anjuli Fatima Raza Kolb, Naa Oyo A. Kwate, Esther Leslie, Lauren Leving, Ani Liu, Adie Mitchell, Timothy Mitchell, Gabrielle Printz, Kyla Schuller, Terry Schwarz, Pallavi Sen, Ayesha A. Siddiqi, and RA Washington.
As the title implies, Sketches on Everlasting Plastics stages an interaction: between institutions, between disciplines, between editorial and curatorial practice, between book and exhibition. Sketches leans into sketching as a methodology for broadening, revising, pushing the discourse on and around the exhibition Everlasting Plastics and our relationship to plastic matter and thought—refusing the exhibition as a static event and seeing it as an invitation to evolve the stakes of a shared conversation. In doing so, it also begins to form a working epistemology of plastic.
CBAC and SPACES will mark the release of Sketches on Everlasting Plastics at Serra dei Giardini in Venice on May 20, 2023, from 9:30am–12:30pm. The event will also initiate the next phase of the editorial project, gathering contributors from the publication and exhibition alongside new respondents.
Columbia Books on Architecture and the City is a small imprint housed within Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation that is dedicated to expanding the ground of architectural discourse and rethinking the assumptions of practice.
SPACES is an alternative non-profit art institution based in Cleveland, Ohio that is a resource and public forum for artists who explore and experiment.
