Sites on Earth
Yasmina El Chami (Sheffield)
Sophia Roosth (NYU)
Response by Spyros Papapetros (Princeton)
How do places become sites of natural abundance? Knowledge-production has played an outsized role in shaping the nature it purports to study. In these talks, geological, architectonic, and landscape formations are shaped to legitimize paradigms of evolution (both natural and otherwise). Yasmina El Chami surveys the architecture of the American rural campus abroad, which helped locate the mountains of the Middle East in religious and agricultural narratives. Sophia Roosth reports on the geo-biologists who, by repeatedly visiting the “sleeping giant” mountain along Lake Superior in search of microfossils, have tapped into Anishinaabe narratives of silver and copper, as well as Anti-Darwinian glacial theory.
Speakers:
Yasmina El Chami is an architect and Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Architectural Humanities at the University of Sheffield. Her work focuses on informal and covert imperial actors in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Middle East. Yasmina holds a BArch from the American University of Beirut, an MPhil from the Architectural Association, and a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Her research has been supported by several awards and fellowships, including a Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts Research and Development Grant; the Scouloudi Fellowship at the Institute of Historical Research; and the Hawksmoor Medal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. Her writings have appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Architectural Theory Review, ABE: Architecture Beyond Europe, and in several edited books. She is also a general editor for Architectural Histories, the EAHN journal.
Sophia Roosth is an anthropologist who writes about the contemporary life and earth sciences. She has published widely in journals including Critical Inquiry, Representations, Differences, American Anthropologist, Science, and Grey Room, as well as in popular venues such as Slate, The Los Angeles Review of Books, American Scientist, Triple Canopy, e-flux, and Aeon. She is the author of Synthetic: How Life Got Made (Chicago 2017), an ethnography of synthetic biologists that documents the profound shifts biology has undergone in the post-genomic age. Her next book, The Quick and the Dead, will offer a historically and ethnographically informed travelogue into the worlds of contemporary geobiologists, scientists seeking ancient microbial life-forms fossilized in stone. Roosth is a Max Planck Society Sabbatical Award Laureate. Her work has also been supported by a Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin, as well as fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.
Spyros Papapetros is Associate Professor of Art and Architectural Theory and Historiography at the School of Architecture and an associated faculty member of the Department of Art and Archaeology, as well as an executive committee member of the Program in Media and Modernity and the Program in European Cultural Studies at Princeton University. He is the author of On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (The University of Chicago Press), the co-editor of Retracing the Expanded Field: Encounters between Art and Architecture (The MIT Press), and the co-editor of the first edition of Magic Architecture: The Story of Human Housing by Frederick Kiesler (forthcoming by the MIT Press, summer 2025). He recently co-curated the exhibition pre-architectures at CIVA, Brussels. His monograph Pre/Architecture is forthcoming by Sternberg Press as part of the Critical Spatial Practice series in 2025.