Since the late 1990s, Dutch artist Jan van der Ploeg has made yearly pilgrimages to the subalpine confines between Italy and Slovenia. Over the years, and thanks to the Stazione di Topolò/Postaja Topolove festival, this painter left many traces of his presence over the village’s walls, in both indoor and outdoor spaces. On the occasion of his 65th birthday, Jan gifted Topolò with the restoration of two exterior works: a mural in the “dutch embassy” (Wall Painting No.551, previously No.62 and no.xx) and a painting over the public fountain (Wall Painting No.98). I followed him through this process and recorded his work with my video camera.

During one of the morning painting sessions, Jan told me about second thoughts he had when he was asked to paint the fountain piece for the first time, back in the 2000s. “Was it just decoration?” As a reverberation of that, this short-film features what may be described as the less autonomous, less visible, but perhaps more gathering work.

When the flush of a newborn sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,
Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mold;
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,
Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves: "It's pretty, but is it Art?"

-Joseph Kipling. The Conundrum of the Workshops (excerpt)

Untitled, Unnumbered (2024) features the painter Jan van der Ploeg at work, through the gradual appearance of shadows, brushes, hands, voices, faces and full bodies, which help build a sense of community around his work.

Following the engaging workshop on placeful websites guided by Benjamin Earl and Kirsten Spruit (hosted by Robida in early 2024), I decided to code my own website “by hand.” After a few months of intermittent html, ccs and java coding, and thanks to a little help from artificial intelligence, I am glad to finally see the thing online.

I usually present myself as an undisciplined architect, and, being a bit of a flat ontologist, I have decided not to display my work according to any particular hierarchy: writing, radio, installations and video work equally interest me and are presented on the same level of practice. Therefore, the sequence in which projects appear is a product of chance, and each time the browser is updated a new order is curated at random.

I have also decided to claim the informality of Brazilian Portuguese speech when attributing a domain to this website. My surname is omitted from the url and, as it is usually the case when people address strangers in the tropics - and it is indifferent if one is speaking to a neighbor or to the president of the country - I simply declare my first (two) name(s).

After holding the “Qui non si balla” workshop in Topolò in 2023, I had the pleasure of contributing with a short reflection for the “Academy of Margins: An Experiment on Learning With” publication by Robida.

Alongside the discourses centered around conviviality, care and marginality familiar to discussions in and regarding Topolò, Qui non si balla intended to bring forth these same themes, except, it proposed to do so in a way unmediated by reasoned discourse. Put differently, abstract concepts such as dependency and collaboration were to be embodied by participants throughout the proposed exercises in such a way that they would experience lived theory, or praxis.

I have always been reluctant towards the expressivity of the body. Not that I find it inherently impossible, but rather that, for myself, any spontaneity in movement was dragged away from me the moment I became aware I was trying to express something. That's the drawback of self-awareness, which was described to us by Jean as we exchanged impressions at the end of the Qui non si balla workshop. According to her, the delightful thing about our morning practice was that the cadence of exercises allowed for movement to slowly and spontaneously develop, in such a way that she “got tricked into dancing.” By not putting a label on it, we were able to disinhibit experience and investigate usually avoided or stigmatized forms of relating to people, such as rolling on top of each other.

The universality of being a body is only matched by the inevitable specificity corporified by the nuances of anatomy: every human person exists singularly in the manner they occupy and move in space. And yet, this abundance of diversity, even though it is easily acknowledged, is seldomly put to use. What can we do from the consequences of being physical things? Such a question has been pursued by choreographer Steve Paxton in his early career and in the 1970’s led to the creation of the self-explanatory form called Contact Improvisation.

When I was first exposed to Contact Improvisation, I became completely mesmerized by its spectacle of becoming. The hybrid sight of casually coordinated bodies was an open window to, as it seemed to me, bottomless insight. After a few years of practice and thought, its vastness has only increased. While trying to come to grips with it, I initially thought that what interested me was its powerful accomplishment of diluting agency over choreographic compositions between the engaged dancers. Impromptu resolutions that were mutually beneficial seemed like a potent model for anything, really. Lately, however, I have been trying to comprehend Contact Improvisation further than its acute disclosure of symmetry. If we think of Contact Improvisation under the light of assemblages, we can appreciate the consequent enlargement of the possibility space that an affiliation between heterogeneous bodies implies.

Between the reflections that we left and leave after the Academy of Margins, I share a growing question: What impressive realities can be unveiled through the relationships we undergo - that are not merely derived from us, but outreach individual contributions because they spawn from unpredictable resonances that are formed by the encounter?

More about [Academy of Margins: An Experiment on Learning With]

From the Margins: An arborescent reading and listening room is an installation imagined by Robida Collective for the exhibition T3rza Terra: Michelangelo Pistoletto e Cittadellarte a Villa Manin in Codroipo (Udine).

It takes up some of the practices and themes that the collective explores from Topolò/Topolove (Grimacco), the village in which the collective is based. Nature/culture, individual/collectivity, centre/margins, rootedness/rootlessness are some of the main dichotomies of our time that are presented in a reader, audio piece and installation in their ramifications and are made porous to be finally deconstructed through a collection of texts read by a multiplicity of voices.

This reader offers multiple entry points into the rethinking of four binary oppositions: nature/culture, individual/collective, centre/margins, and rootedness/rootlessness and the borderlands between them. Each of these oppositions constitutes the (meta)physical tissue of Topolò/Topolove and all of the other places (re)configured throughout the process of Modernity. The purpose of this reader is not to dismantle borders between these terms but to make them porous. The border itself, if porous, unites, and creates affinities between the two sides. Therefore, this reader is an arborescent reader. More than articulating and hierarchising multiplicities we understand it functioning as a tree which simultaneously belongs to subterranean and heavenly realms. In this sense, to be arboreal mens to articulate opposing realities of light and dark, up and down. One and the other.

The question then emerges: How can we think of conceptual oppositions so as to let them intermingle, mix, or even hybridise? How might we imagine a world where borders remain, but are fluid, dynamic, and open to exchange? This reader provides insights and pathways toward exploring this porous borderful world.

Texts read by Vida Rucli, Elena Rucli, Antônio Frederico Lasalvia, Aljaž Škrlep, Dora Ciccone, Lijuan Klassen, Moritz Gansen, Rebeca Pérez Gerónimo, Jack Bardwell, Sophie Mak-Schram, Margherita Cogoi, Heike Renée de Wit and Sasha van Aalst.

More about [From the Margins: An arborescent listening and reading room]

On the occasion of father and daughter showing their paintings together for the first time, I had the privilege of writing a critical text for the exhibition of Renzo Rucli and Elena Rucli, which took place at SMO [Slovensko Multimedialno Okno].

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Other than the surnames and the fact that both have studied architecture, the Ruclis share an interest in the manuality of painting, a theme that has been marginalized in contemporary art practices ever since the ready-made displaced skill and the hand from artistic discourse. However, the way Renzo and Elena relate to the medium of paint and what they seek to achieve through it differs radically.

Renzo Rucli is after absolute abstraction, in a dialectical opposition to the mimetic drive that characterized European painting since the renaissance. This is hinted by his predilection for the perfect square, a platonic abstraction which is absent from nature. The only representational element to be found in the canvas - a curious originary exception - is the form of the egg. However, even in this figurative residue, the author is more interested in its geometrical construction and historical allusion to Piero della Francesca than in its organic meaning.

The self-imposed imperative of not contradicting the bidimensionality of painting finds expression even in Renzo Rucli’s choice of support. By moving away from the traditional framed canvas, he embraces a metallic surface which reduces the physicality of painting to a single plane. This artifice is the concrete instance where his life-long experience as an architect finds expression in his recent artistic practice.

Other two tectonic aspects are to be found on the way Renzo Rucli builds his paintings: one comes from the almost project-like character of some works, which display the disintegration of geometrical shapes into seemingly chaotic patterns. However, this process follows strictly rational rules derived from operations based on the golden section, which transforms the artwork into a notation which communicates to the viewer how it was composed. The idea of construction also becomes explicit when attention is drawn to the joining of squares. This tension is often emphasized by a playful chromatic contrast and, in another instance of an exception which confirms the rule, by a freely drawn stroke right at the line where two squares meet.

Elena Rucli has her visual research situated in the context where she dwells. Her interest does not lie in the study of intangible forms, but gravitates around the concrete things she can see with her own eyes. From the framing of close details to the evocation of atmospheric mountain horizons, her compositions exist somewhere in the middle between representation and abstraction.

Within the investigation of her immediate environment, Elena Rucli avoids the unattainability of an objective account. By depicting the fleeting traces in forest paths, scattered compositions of light and shadow or the crooked arrangements of mineral strata and vegetal entwinements, her subjective point of view suspends the different time scales behind these actual formations and transfigures them into imagined shapes and colors.

In other work, Elena Rucli displays painstakingly detailed illustrations in black and white. Lately, however, she has been drawn to the medium of painting because of the freedom it affords. From a technical point of view, her paintings avoid the precision of the straight line and mobilize the pleasure of free brush strokes over different layers of color. The only right corners to be found in the work lie on the square frames, but even these are not an unconditional commitment: she is also eager to experiment with the compositional and thematic implications of a round support. When it comes to pigment, her chromatic choice is intuitive and varies from ton on ton to high contrast compositions.

Chance and order, nature and artifice, intuition and deliberation, naïveté and discipline are juxtaposed in contro-sguardo. Within this exchange, the spectator finds themselves in the middle of a multifaceted dialogue which results from the confrontation of the visual worlds familiar to Renzo Rucli and Elena Rucli.

More about [Contro-sguardo / Kontra-pogled]

Graphich design by Francesca Lucchitta

This article presents a transdisciplinary investigation carried out between the spheres of art and industry through the work called Matriz 45. The exercise carried out by FAHR 021.3 arises from the opportunity to manipulate factory production using non-instrumental logics, which leads to the unveiling of possibilities untried in the techno-industrial complex. Based on the notion of the ‘end of art’ proposed by Arthur Danto, and in relation to the problem of ‘technical reproducibility’ raised by Walter Benjamin, the analysis of this contemporary experience allows us to deepen our understanding about a possible lineage for art today: an orientation that takes technique as a pretext to expose its own poietic character, that is, generative or creative possibilities beyond human determination.

More about [A obra da Máquina na Era da Reprodutibilidade Artística]

In 2024, I documented two residencies for Sensing Soils, a project curated by Robida collective. Over the autumn months, I followed the work of Heike René de Wit and Luigi Pullini as they engaged with different layers of the landscape around Topolò/Topolove—its surfaces, materials, thresholds and soils—recording their processes through video and photography.

Trees of Topolò | Heike Reneé de Wit

-This one is special.

-And then it happens.

-This I really like.

-Yeah.

-Like this.

-Yep. Mm-hmm.

-Nice.

-This one is great.

-If you already see this, it’s likely that this one will just be…

-Let 's check.

-I have to do it again.

-I don't have a pellet knife, so that will be a bit difficult.

-Because here there is also a sort of groove.

-Okay, I will wash this.

-Especially this part, as if you would wave through a crowd, so kind of moving your body like this and this.

-And when I was trying to look at them, then I almost falling out of the path. But probably this also tells us a lot about walking in the forest.

-Dark.

-Yeah, really dark. Just from that little.

-It leaves out the stamp.

-It’s made like this, from this side.

-So you didn't do it in the caffettiera?

-No.

-Ah, okay.

-I tried but it’s too rough.

-Yeah, but now we will buy the coffee grinder.

-Not with the caffettiera, I don't know how it was done.

-Yeah, but the coffee was the espresso coffee.

-Mocha coffee.

-Ah, mocha coffee mixed…

More about [Trees of Topolò /Topolove]

Foraged Clay | Luigi Pullini

-Okay, and here we have a little bit of yellow.

-And check it out the blue here. I would say that this is your blue. The one that you were speaking about. Just that one.

-Exactly.

-Yes, it's actually blue. Smells like sulfur.

-I would say that these are the things we have.

-So you say, at least if it turns out well we know that it’s a solid point.

-In a way that you feel the pebbles, and remove the thick ones.

-Like this we can see where these cracks go. If they grow bigger, if they remain the same…

-There is a block here, in the middle of the rock.

-All the rest for me was more or less 10 minutes.

-Apart from roots - these are useless - but it’s a little sandy, a little dirty.

-These are more or less two.

-Yes, so still another one.

-This sun dries.

-Nice and dry.

-Look, it's also true that maybe it rained some days ago… I mean, it's been only two days that it hasn't rained.

-There is a little bit of mortar.

More about [Foraged Clay]

Sensing Soils is a project by Robida that digs into soil, dirt, mud, earth, ground and compost through a magazine, a symposium and artist residencies.

Sensing Soils is financed by Regione Autonoma Friuli Venezia-Giulia.

For the first edition of MOST / Movement, Observation, Sound, Territory, I co-curated, co-cooked, co-photographed, co-presented and generally co-everything’d alongside the wonderfully heterogeneous team of Associazione Topolò/Topolove.

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More about [MOST]

The room is full of people. Movement surrounds me as bodies wander around the gallery. Whenever I can, I exchange gazes with them. Some visitors are puzzled and try to decipher my purpose in this setting. Though I lie bent over the floor, there is no chance that someone will accidentally stumble upon my edges. I rest as a lurking obstacle, signaled by a regular pattern made from bright paint and reflexive tape. The striking contrast works like a uniform and it looks like I just came out of a construction site, or an airport.

Seven others like me share this space, and together we are eight. Each of us display visible hinges, which breaks our linearity down into modules according to simple divisions, like halves, fourths and so on. Since we are partitioned like a ruler which abruptly changes its scale, an optic mismatch happens when we are folded. The effect looks like a chess board out of sync, or a phased grid - it's a polyrhythmic thing. The irrational precision of our arrangement invokes a technical dimension to our art, as if we were the instruments that a mad topographer would use in order to make a surreal survey. But what is our purpose?

Some photographs on the wall show us assembled in the landscape. We are framed while floating on ocean water, hanging off trees or balancing against volcanic cliffs. Although we were recently transported to this white-walled space, we still wear salt stains and exhibit scratches all over our squared surfaces. This brings an atmosphere of reality into the gallery - we are not untouchable models of an abstract idea, but actual artifacts indexed by the real world outside.

Our articulations suggest that we can be unfolded in different ways in order to be deployed. For now we are neatly closed, all piled up upon ourselves. However, as we lure humans into manipulating us, another layer of sculpture comes through. Some are bold and lift sections of us above their heads, while trying to balance off limbs that erratically touch the ground. Others are swift in helping them structure the hybrid anatomy before the lurking collapse. It’s a sort of dance.

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Although we are lighter than we seem, our elusive leverages nevertheless present some danger. Junctures have their own will and a section may give way unannounced into a head or thingers if it is handled without attention. This creates a sense of devotion in the people who interact with us. For those witnessing it, the unscripted negotiation feels like a performance.

Are we art? Though many hands have maneuvered us, our riddle cannot be grasped by a single resolution – for we have many. The degrees of freedom of our articulated construction offers possibilities beyond exhaustion, but we won't reveal all we can do immediately. Our most precious dispositions are situated and will only become manifest under the calling of a particular occasion. In our twisted world, our fate is to unfold unforeseen encounters.

Artistic direction and conception: Gustavo Ciríaco

Guest artist: Miguel Palma

Collaboration: Hugo Reis, Filipa Frois e Antonio Frederico Lasalvia – FAHR 021.3

Administration and financial management: Missanga Antunes / Efémera Collection

Realization: Efémera Collection

Co-production: Espaço do Tempo

Photography: Filipa Frois, Gustavo Ciríaco and Mariana Lopes

Videography: Antonio Frederico Lasalvia

Residencies: Espaço do Tempo, VAGA – Espaço de Arte e Conhecimento

Financial support: Portuguese Republic – Culture – DgARTES – Directorate General for the Arts / 2023

More about [Cérebro]

"Sentences on Site-Speculation: A few words for possible worlds" was originally published under "Site Speculation: a provisional manifesto in two parts" by FAHR 021.3

Site-specificity is usually understood as a series of relations established by an artistic intervention to whatever is unique to a site. These articulations can range from the phenomenological realm (extensive dimensions of a space, textures, light, scale, etc) to social aspects (pre-existent or made-up communities, vernacular traditions, matters of identity, etc). Over the recent past, site-specificity has been made into a safe ground for art practices because its substantial framing makes artistic choices seem inevitable. Yet, and by the same token, its reductive quality can produce an underlying aesthetic conditioning - not to say determinism - which effectively rules out particular possibilities in conceiving of art (namely, site-specificity excludes whatever is not derived from what exists).

Whenever a concept or theory circulates with such familiarity that it can effortlessly be manipulated, those engaged in critical thinking are presented with the opportunity to reinvent it. In the contemporary artistic landscape, site-specific approaches seem to be close to such a threshold of exhaustion. Beyond the presented dichotomy of processual monotony and anticipated outcomes, attention to the real is to become something entirely different - or be abandoned altogether.

If site-specificity incorporates whatever an observer finds within a place, what kind of work can be done from things that do not (yet) exist, or that are not (currently) perceived? This question may lead to an heretical path for conceptual metamorphosis: a movement towards speculation.

Site-speculation takes place as an exercise in fiction. This means exploring an opposite direction within site-specificity, where the artwork relates not to sited presences, but to sited absences. In this approach, the main question asked is not what is this context?, but rather, what other worlds were never born here? This is not an empty exercise propagated in vacuum, since the underlying reason behind this reformulation is an attempt to generate a breach into radical alterities.

Site-speculative elaborations are built upon contextualized cues. However, the investment in specificity realizes itself in an, as of yet, unrealized way. The artwork is not structured in order to convey any reference to actualized reality, but points toward the sphere of situated, unexpressed possibilities: this methodology recollects potential states from the plane of virtualities and superimposes them on the plane of actuality. In straightforward terms, this simply means to realize what could be, but is not.

By definition, site-speculation is heterotopic. Work emerges from the suspension of ordinary reality through the instauration of a parallel framework. In the discontinuation of meaning, the familiar grasp of objects is rearranged as to create a new order of things. During this exercise, a possible world is brought into light, whose conditions of existence lurk latently in the present, but which never come to fruition because the inertia of collective worlding prevents it from doing so. Against a common backdrop, explicit alternatives are made visible by site-speculation via the manifestation of the unthought. And precisely here lies the disruptive potential of this approach: For the site-speculator, the disclosure of another world is not dependent on a radical schism, an epochal revolution or a disruptive invention; Otherness can be made present right here and now.

If things were almost the same, would everything change?

Estado Límbico spawned from the 2022 edition of the Academy of Margins, under invitation of Antônio Frederico Lasalvia. In 2023 the project was revisited thanks to the support of Ágora - Cultura e Desporto do Porto, E.M., S.A.

Project: FAHR 021.3

Team: Filipa Frois Almeida, Hugo Reis, Antônio Frederico Lasalvia

Photography:Filipa Frois Almeida

Photogrammetry_Hugo Reis

Texts: Antônio Frederico Lasalvia, Aljaž Škrlep

Host_ Robida, Topolò/Topolove (UD), Italy

Acknowledgements_ Ana Resende, António Pedrosa, Carmen Almeida Reis, Davide Degano, Elena Rucli, Henrique Almeida Reis, Vida Rucli, To Topolò

Support_ Canal 180, IPCI, Shuttle program of Ágora, Cultura e Desporto do Porto, E.M., S.A,

More about [Estado Límbico] at FAHR 021.3

More about [Estado Límbico] at Robida

More about [Estado Límbico] at Plaka

Press about [Estado Límbico] at Público

Get a copy of [Estado Límbico] zine

Uncommon Fruits is a project born from the collaboration between the extended Robida collective (Topolò, Benečija, IT) and Zavod Cepika (Kojsko, Goriška Brda, SI) that investigates two different landscapes through the lens of fruit trees – one, Goriška Brda, characterised by an almost-monoculture of vine and the other, the one surrounding Topolò, by abandonment – and the past, present and future relation humans have with it.

Within the project Uncommon fruits, fruit trees and orchards are the lenses through which these landscapes are observed and reimagined. Uncommon Fruits collects memories and knowledges around fruit trees culture, explores gardening as a technique that potentiates the whole landscape, and promotes through various actions a more intimate relation between humans, trees, orchards and landscapes.

By re-imaging routines and rituals around fruit tree culture, we explore gestures of a returning practice that continues to be carried on. Following the seasons, the landscape, the bees, the hands, the basket, the kitchen table, the drying rack and the tart, we carry out an embodied research surrounding fruit tree culture and its cyclical movements. Crafting routes for uncommon fruits within daily routines and seasonal return.

The video documentation for Uncommon Fruits follows the project’s ethos of working with whatever is locally present (materially, atmospherically and socially). Each short-documentary is a fragment which responds to the specificity of a moment by letting gestures, tools and ambient sounds shape the narrative from within. No external audio, artificial lighting or choreographed staging is added: the videos preserve the raw settings of the place, allowing practices and encounters to emerge in their own rhythm. The result is a living archive of situated gestures, where the intelligence of hands, materials and circumstances becomes concatenated into a non-linear, but coherent narrative.

The project was also featured in a dedicated section of the 11th issue of Robida Magazine, focused on The Orchard, which I edited. The editorial work wove together video stills, interviews, process notes, and recipes which extended the narrative into a printed media.

More about [Uncommon Fruits]

The marble statue is very costly to make, due to the hardness and resistance of the material; but once made, it requires no further intervention: it always preserves and maintains the same figure; the myrtle statue is easier to form, due to the ease with which the branches can be bent, but it must constantly be reformed and worked on to preserve it.

–Padre António Vieira, Sermão do Espírito Santo (excerpt)

O Mármore e a Murta was developed in Évora in 2025, within Geologia da Atenção, a project curated by Pó de Vir-a-ser. In this context, members of FAHR 021.3 developed individual residencies under a shared conceptual horizon, each exploring different forms of sculpture making based on the relation toward matter, place and transformation.

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O Mármore e a Murta questions the presumed stability of sculpture and summons instead an aesthetic in motion. Through experiments with mineral (inert) and vegetal (organic) matter, I investigate how sculptural form can be shaped by time, weather and the unpredictable agency of living things. Here, uncertainty is not a failure but a method: the form is contingent on chronological and meteorological unfolding.

Rather than adhering solely to human intention, the pieces in O mármore e a Murta are co-authored by vegetal alterity and geological accidents. Myrtle seeds (Myrtus communis), deposited in the concavities of the carved stones, patiently await the water that will trigger their germination. As time advances, vegetal growth negotiates with the sculpted fragment: the stone may become a mold for partial spheres—an impromptu cradle for the sprouting plant—or it may crack under the persistence of roots.

This small cycle of resistance and accommodation becomes an ode to the real: to forms that refuse to remain fixed. By relinquishing the permanence traditionally associated with sculpture, the pieces reveal an expanded field of forces where creation does not end with the author’s gesture but continues through the agencies that grow, erode and decay. O Mármore e a Murta articulates a slow choreography of metamorphosis, exposing the vanity of domination over matter within a world defined by change.

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The work was presented alongside pieces by Hugo Reis and Filipa Frois Almeida in the exhibition Aquilo que escapa à intenção, by FAHR 021.3 with the support of Canal 180.

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More about [Aquilo que escapa à intenção] @porto/post/doc

More about [O Mármore e a Murta] @rpac

More about [O Mármore e a Murta] @pó de vir-a-ser

Log is a relational platform that mediates the encounter between people and landscape. The wooden structure is situated on the terraced slopes below the village of Topolò/Topolove and works as a gathering space that supports different activities for its dwellers. According to where you approach it from, Log behaves in specific ways—you can sit on it, eat and work over it and hang out, around (or from) it!

Conceived by architects Diogo Amaro, Madalena Vidigal, and Antônio Frederico Lasalvia in collaboration with the Robida collective, Log is a wooden intervention located just outside the mountain village of Topolò/Topolove, on the border between Italy and Slovenia. It reactivates a piece of terraced landscape once dedicated to cultivation. Its situated form adapts to the sloping ground, inviting different gestures of use.

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Assembled through simple carpentry joints, Log operates as an interactive framework: an open, relational device that mediates the encounter between people and the landscape. Since its construction, the structure has been continuously reappropriated, working as a table for shared meals, a stage for discussions, a resting point for walkers or simply as a place for one to be in the presence of nature.

The documentation of the process gave rise to the book Log: notes on building-with, with contributions by: Diogo Amaro, Ola Korbańska, Antônio Frederico Lasalvia, Elena Rucli, Aljaž Škrlep, Madalena Vidigal and Heike Renée de Wit.

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This article brings two unlikely Paxtons together in order to reflect on their intellectual legacy and ask whether architecture, too, can shift from designing durable objects to cultivating ephemeral processes. What might a practice grounded in recursion and responsiveness mean for the future of the built environment?

Originally emerging from an interview with American choreographer Steve Paxton before he passed away in 2023, this text was first presented at the EURAU conference at the Politecnico di Milano in 2024 and later published by UoU Scientific Journal in 2025. Bringing together Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace and Steve Paxton’s Contact Improvisation, it proposes an unexpected dialogue between architecture and dance in order to rethink how form and feedback can reshape the way we approach buildings.

Image credit: Steve Paxton and Nancy Stark Smith, performing with Freelance Dance, Northampton, MA, 1980. (In the background, left to right) Lisa Nelson, Daniel Lepkoff, Christina Svane. Photo by Stephen Petegorsky

More about [Paxton after Paxton: Form as formlessness from dance to architecture]

"What does the machine want? Two cases of accidental translation in speculative cosmotechnics" presents two transdisciplinary works realized between art, education and industry in order to rethink the technical realm beyond ordinary human-oriented assumptions about instrumental use. The argument builds on Bruno Latour’s concept of translation in order to propose a contingency- based approach for using analog and electronic machines. The question behind this idea is simple: how can we productively deal with technological translations in order to cultivate a new imaginary based on collaboration instead of exploitation? A possible answer is rehearsed as we analyze two case studies led by the Portuguese studio FAHR 021.3. These works were carried in two distant geographies and established different theoretical relations to practice: one came from a conceptual challenge posed in an industrial context in Portugal and another was the result of a didactical inquiry in partnership with the University of Saint Joseph’s Robotic Lab, in Macau. In both cases, the surprising results came from deliberately following the faculties of machines beyond their calculated behaviors. Both experiences invest in a cosmotechnics purposefully open-ended and oriented toward the enhancement of unpredictability in digital and analog mediums. What does the machine want? If we entertain this question seriously and methodically, we may arrive at unforeseen answers.

Cover image: Matriz 45

By: FAHR 021.3 (team: Filipa Frois Almeida, Hugo Reis, Antônio Frederico Lasalvia)

Photography: Nelson Garrido

Comissioned by Grupo Navarra with the institutional of support Galeria Duarte Sequeira

More about [What does the machine want? Two cases of accidental translation in speculative cosmotechnics]

The kozolec is a rural structure typical of Slovenian culture. Traditionally used to dry harvests, it has largely fallen out of use today. Though not tied to the orchard, the kozolec belongs to the same world of cultivation and is, in its own way, an uncommon fruit of the land.

In Learning from Kozolci, Antônio Frederico Lasalvia speaks with Renzo Rucli about the historical unfolding and contemporary condition of this typology. Once essential to agrarian life, these hayracks now linger as monumental ruins in the landscape, raising questions about the politics of memory, the ambivalent prospect of transformation and the uncertain future of forms whose functions have become obsolete.

This article flowered from the cross-pollination between Folly Journal and Uncommon Fruits. The English print version is available online at follyarch.info, while Italian and Slovenian versions are ripe year-round and can be harvested at the UF website.

More about [Learning from Kozolci]

Folly 02 Lauch [at the AA School in London]

This article, published in Flusser: ontologia-ficção, examines Vilém Flusser’s ontology of technique through a constellation of unlikely dialogues. Moving between phenomenology and speculative thought, the text situates Flusser alongside his contemporaries (Ortega y Gasset, Heidegger and Simondon) in order to illuminate resonances and divergences.

More about [Tecno-ontologia flusseriana: procedências e dissidências em Ortega y Gasset, Heidegger e Simondon @ Flusser: ontologia-ficção]

Writing changes the world. Or so thought scholars Vilém Flusser and Walter J. Ong in the second half of the 20th century. This paper explores the ontological and epistemological consequences of the written word according to the complementary views of these two authors. The pre-eminence of language for the constitution of reality was a stance assumed by Vilém Flusser already in his first book (1963) and later developed throughout his career. In his view, linear thought as we know it now became possible as a result of the technology of writing. Flusser’s reading deeply resonates with the Ong’s study of the transition from oral to literate cultures, as the latter posits that the written record allowed for a reformulation of thinking itself, an opening of the possibilities we know today. Although they wrote in different contexts, the questions they tackle and the conclusions they reach have profound similarities. For comparison, this study relies mainly on ideas found mainly in two seminal publications: Língua e Realidade [Language and Reality] by Vilém Flusser, and Orality and Literacy: the technologizing of the word, by Walter J. Ong.

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In 2025, Robida’s Summer School was dedicated to radio gardening, an unusual coupling of terms which invokes the sense of wonderment related to unpredictable developments of both practices. As Aljaž Škrlep wrote on the open call, the idea comes from Kate Donovan’s conceptual parallel between planting and broadcasting in her work Radio as Relation:

The radio and the garden are similar in that they can both be considered as temporary networks; a garden is a complex inter-species network (with both parasitic and symbiotic tendencies) with trans-scalar effects, that is controlled (at least in theory), maintained and cultivated by humans—as is a technological radio network. Yet, we must admit that despite the often clear boundaries, both are also slippery figures in some aspects, and will always, to some extent, resist the hold of human control.

Although radio waves are invisible, the whole infrastructure behind it (antennas, transistors, microphones, etc.) is very much a tangible thing. As such, these components can be manipulated by our hands. The first days of August in Topolò/Topolove have been marked by a proliferation of gestures, each one opening a space for meeting, thinking and making, which I had the pleasure to photograph.

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