Book launch: Interferences. Architecture as Multiplicity
On March 6th, at 6:30 pm, at the Palácio Galveias Library in Lisbon, I am delighted to announce the launch of my latest book, Interferências: Arquitetura como Multiplicidade (Interferences: Architecture as Multiplicity), published by Circo de Ideias. The event will be graced by the presence of Architect Pedro Machado Costa, who authored the preface, and Philosopher Maria Filomena Molder, alongside the editor, Architect Pedro Baía.
Although predominantly in Portuguese, the book features two interviews conducted in English by myself — one with the photographer Hélène Binet, and another with Architect Peter Zumthor, conducted during my research residency at his studio in 2010/11 — as well as a text published in Log (Spring/Summer 2016).
SYNOPSIS
Interferences: Architecture as Multiplicity presents a collection of texts by Susana Ventura, predominantly published across various media platforms, dispersed spatially and temporally. It includes some unpublished pieces and others previously presented only orally until this book. The book proposes an intensive sequence, ranging from oral to written word. It begins with a set of orally presented texts, followed by a section featuring selected interviews, including the first publication of the interview conducted by the author with Peter Zumthor as part of her doctoral research. The third section, "Storytelling," gathers a series of stories (a story always contains echoes of ancestral orality). The final section, "From Writing (Non-essayistic and Essayistic)," presents a collection of essays. The texts traverse several intersecting thematic and conceptual lines, ultimately forming the author’s rhizomatic thinking. This eliminates a chronological organisation of the texts, as many revisit old ideas or draw on examples already integral to the author’s practice. This coalescence of the texts’ own temporalities justifies, in part, their inclusion in this book.
FROM THE PREFACE
“If nothing else, Susana Ventura’s (writing about) architecture aims to provide that awareness of what coexists with logic, contradicting it. More: she underlines, with skill, that inconsistency, prompting reflection on matters that historians have difficulty relating to. Hence her dedication to recounting what did not happen, or what happened to everyone: “in the fresh grass in the morning / The raw skin caressed by the breeze and by the body / of each other, / in the discreet company of playfulness” [Paradise redux, concerning Paradise, P. Bandeira + 18:25] - or to recreate Prospero’s Tempest [Casa da Ilha-Vulcão, about the author’s stay at E/C House, by Inês Vieira da Silva and Miguel Vieira, 2005-2014]. As if each work could be a summary of the unpredictable. That makes every architect a thinker without reason” — Pedro Machado Costa.