MIARD launches Extraction: A trans-scalar inquiry, the first issue of the new thematic publication series Spatial Folders. The periodical is published by the faculty of Master Interior Architecture: Research and Design (MIARD) program at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
With its thematic focus on extraction and extractivism, this first issue of Spatial Folders looks into the power structures that make our worlds and their historicities. Over time, extraction processes have been making and changing the spaces of the world through displacement of bodies and matter, from within and across the earth.
At the same time, these processes establish epistemologies and forms of representation that articulate extraction as “natural” or “inevitable,” within the frameworks of anthropocentrism, capitalism, colonialism, racism, or hetero-reproductivism. While focusing on materials and sites of analysis, the authors lay out the systems of extraction that operate on multiple scales simultaneously, underlining the need for trans-scalar understandings of the processes and spaces of extraction and their residual representations. This points to the interconnected nature and systemic understanding of the effects of extractivism. The works do not turn away from the material aspect of extraction, but rather closely trace the spatial and material conditions and consequences of extraction in the case of oil, hormones, milk, wood, and water, among others.
The book features a foreword by Jane Rendell, and essays by Eva Garibaldi, Shiila Infriccioli, Natasha Marie Llorens, Shonali Shetty, Alex Augusto Suárez, Agnes Tatzber, Elien Vermoortel, Dominique Willis. It is edited by Golnar Abbasi and Kris Dittel, designed by Dongyoung Lee, and published by MIARD, Piet Zwart Institute.
Master Interior Architecture: Research + Design, MIARD at the Piet Zwart Institute is a post-graduate international program that is part of the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. MIARD is a two-year multidisciplinary program with a focus on practice-based research and critical spatial strategies in the field of interior architecture.