“Acting that they may evolve”: Spatio-Plurality, Diverse Intelligences and Regeneration in the Rural Ecosystems of Guangdong Province

This talk approaches the topic of regeneration, repair and reconstruction in light of the concept of coexistence. It argues specifically that architecture and its diverse assemblages from the village to the city are relational systems prior to any material manifestation. This “pure relationality” produces and is, likewise, produced by the coexistence, that is the persistence and sustained individuation over time of a diversity of actors, human and extra-human, biological, technological and virtual. The argument put forth in the following is that the conceptualization, recognition, caring for and governing of this coexistence is one of the most profound problems in current architectural, urbanist, design and artistic practices and the overlap thereof. The 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale posed this question as How will we live together? Here, it is addressed from an ecological perspective as action to catalyze each other’s mutual evolution. The research presented here takes villages in Shunde District and Shixing County, Guangdong Province, as its specific context with a particular focus on extra-modern traditions and practices existing outside of the homogenizing universalization of modernization. Employing artistic and experimental research methodology and building upon situated, embodied and diversifying approaches in anthropology, cognitive science and physics, such as multinaturalism, enactivism and quantum bayesianism, the presentation argues that different forms of cognition enact a diversity of spaces and, by extension, world models: To regenerate and reconstruct, we have to design and build for more-than-human worlds. This decolonial approach ultimately poses the question of the integration of synthetic forms of cognition and intelligence and the alignment thereof.