Situated Authorships

We bring the past out of the land and bear the land into the future, but at heart of all is the land, contested, exploited and beloved. (Jamie 2024, 55)

Sites are repositories of stories, overwritten by the passage of time and intentional alterations. These stories can be embodied in their physical features and in the cultural meanings imbued in them (Corner 1999), through a process of becoming that concerns physical alterations as much as the societal attribution of meaning. Sites undergo a process of layering of traces in time (Corboz 1983) – material remains, rituals, and memories – due to the linear sequence of events, involving choices and mistakes, or cyclical occurrences linked to natural phenomena or unpredictable events. The acknowledgment of such traces can become the catalyst for architectural invention and research. As pointed out by Elizabeth Meyer, “plots are not empty canvases, but full spaces, full of nature and history, whose latent forms and meanings can be surfaced, and made palpable, through design” (Meyer 2005, 102).

The contributions gathered in this section¹ share the understanding of authorship as situated knowledge, with processes directly tied to a specific site, both in terms of physical characteristics and social energies surrounding it.

Across the contributions, sites are viewed as composed of a layered set of meaning and traces. Within them lies an opportunity for architecture to interpret them and create spaces that enable the projection of plural meaning onto them, either by individuals or society. Thus, buildings and public spaces, and the projects that concern them, are described in their potential to evoke feelings and enable experiences. They embody beliefs in physical spaces, whether this attribution of meaning is given by the place’s occupants (2, 6, 8, 9), through the recollection of memories (7, 10), or as platforms for collective representation and cultural resonance (1, 3, 5, 6, 9) even beyond the conceiver’s intentions. This sparks the possibility for spaces perceived as minor, like courtyards and functional buildings, to question rule systems and established narratives surrounding representational spaces and collective emotions. (1, 3, 6)

Overall, the collected research depart from traditional approaches, with the singular heroic author shaping the world – often through the western gaze and using science for persuasion (Haraway 1988, 577) – embracing instead authorship as a plural and multilayered practice, situated in different settings and belief systems. Authorship is also a method of critique. In this outlook, it is possible to conceive sites as a product of collective action, even rewriting in a political turn national narratives and the establishment, such as neoliberal policies (4) or central governments’ imprints (3, 6) that tend to monopolise spatial narratives, overwriting local experiences. It celebrates instead uncontrolled spaces, disentangled from official regulations, as an embodiment of the true soul of the surrounding communities, shaping spaces through time and the way they inhabit them. Non-hierarchical practices involving participatory research (2) and subjective attribution of meaning (9, 10), a practice of correspondence with others and the place (Ingold 2017), to reassert the importance of authorship as a practice of relations, a political act of interpretation and creation. The collective notion of authorship emerges from a conflict between those who have the authority to write history and those who have the capacity to live it. The author-researchers in this sense can be both a receiver of stories, becoming a storyteller for minorities (6, 7) or utilise their stories to reinvent them (8, 9), stressing the importance of plurality and multiple possible perspectives (4, 10). In this process of selecting stories is implicit the importance of singular choices, including or excluding narratives as an act, conscious or not, of creation of the place identity.

Sites are seen as arenas to bring about and mediate change with a potential value for art as mediator, able to communicate invisible aspects or re-signify the ordinary with new meanings. Thus, throughout this section, the potential of storytelling and its poetic translation is highlighted. Meanings are attributed to a place beyond the visible, translating situated knowledge through research, uncovering or creating new site-specific narratives. The shared goal is to go beyond established gazes, mainly the traditional Western one (3, 6, 8, 10), tapping into local stories, myths, and workshops on-site with local communities. The results are a mix of art and science, able to capture knowledge beyond rigid disciplinary boundaries. In this, the choice of representational tools is also relevant, as they function as methods of thinking and articulating knowledge, using bidimensional representations, like drawings (1, 3, 9), counter-maps (2, 4), and poems or small stories (5, 6, 7, 8), or tridimensional ones in the form of installations (9, 10). The use of such tools, rooted in the researchers’ personal sensitivity or site-specific anecdotes, shows how abstract concepts can be made tangible in physical spaces and lived practices, allowing the embodiment of larger theoretical arguments. They produce hybrid artefacts, results of the combination of factual knowledge, deriving from physical documents, and stories mediated by the cultural attribution of meaning and singular experiences. The researcher-author here also acts as mediator, creating an interface between experience, either direct or indirect, and representation, shifting from a historical quest for production knowledge to one of knowledge relation. This knowledge is gained through immersion, with researchers inserting themselves into the site by living it, listening, mapping, making and caring for it, stressing the importance of physical presence. However, this implies a risk of conflicting narratives and a challenge to properly represent them (4). Authorship is not neutral but is co-produced through the interaction between subjects – human, institutional or more than human – and the physical space they shape and inhabit. The site becomes a living archive in which authorship is shared between those who inhabit, those who design and those who remember. Architecture becomes a physical medium through which these emotions are materialised and experienced.
Among the cited physical spaces – such as unassuming courtyards (3,6), a countryside hotel (7) or a humble pottery workshop (8) – each can also act as a meeting point to generate and create stories, forms for finding lost identities, or create a new sense of belonging to a place. The passage of time has the power to create a temporal layering of meaning. Buildings and landscapes relate past and present, what happened and what could be. In some instances, even more than the original authors' intention, it is the potential interpretation given by observers (9, 10) that, according to their belief system, memories and feelings, constructs and deconstructs the meaning and role of a space.

Therefore, in this section, research is mostly intended as an open-ended process, without fixed results and embracing the changes linked to social dynamics, time passage and unforeseen events. This can invoke “an attitude of incompleteness; rather than building a final solution, seeds are sown, questions raised, and potential structured” (Marot 1999, 5). The approach is not authoritarian but mostly an act of co-creation, relying also on the willingness of others to share their outlook, with the authors-researchers inhabiting sites and becoming a part of their network of relations continuously rewritten. Thus, authorship – or better yet, plural authorships- lie in situatedness (Haraway 1988), translating and designing reality in its complexity without claiming universality. Relinquishing the assumption of objectivity while relying on the acknowledgment of the individual gaze, the situated authorships accept the possibility of an unfinished practice.