Introducing Archipelago: Podcasting Deinstitutionalized Knowledge | #thinking

A pro­ject cre­ated by Léopold Lambert as the pod­cast plat­form of The Funambulist.

The idea of Archipelago emerged from the will to pro­pose an al­tern­ative to the cur­rent state of Academia (whether ar­chi­tec­tural or not). The gen­er­al­ized ab­sence of bridges between dis­cip­lines, the petty in­ternal politics, the clear cat­egor­iz­a­tion of teachers and learners, as well as the ‘punc­tu­al­iz­a­tion’ of learning formed the base of this will to pro­pose some­thing different.

Disciplines should be blurred, young thinkers should have ac­cess to plat­forms of ex­pres­sion and learning should be a con­tinuous activity throughout life. Archipelago does not have the il­lusory am­bi­tion to re­place the uni­ver­sity, but more simply to con­sti­tute a free place for learning and ques­tioning the politics of the de­signed en­vir­on­ment that sur­rounds us all. Its me­dium al­lows anyone to listen to it in all kinds of situ­ations: while com­muting, cooking, resting, working, or any other situ­ation you might think appropriate.

Archipelago’s edit­orial line fol­lows the one con­structed year after year on The Funambulist. This line is based upon the pre­dicate that design (clothing, ob­jects, ar­chi­tec­ture and urb­anism) or­gan­izes (polit­ic­ally) bodies in space. Such a pre­dicate cre­ates the need to wonder sim­ul­tan­eously what a body is and how design is produced.

These ques­tions define the list of guests for the con­ver­sa­tion it re­leases. A sig­ni­ficant number of these guests are already part of the net­work com­posed by The Funambulist. Some of them took part (or are about to) in the series of cur­ated texts col­lected in the book The Funambulist Papers: Volume 1 pub­lished by Punctum Books in 2013 (Volume 2 will be pub­lished later in 2014). However, the pro­ject also finds its es­sence in re­searching the work of other thinkers and cre­ators to di­ver­sify and en­rich the dis­course pro­posed on both The Funambulist and Archipelago.

An im­portant com­ponent in the se­lec­tion of these guests is their di­versity, as well as their re­la­tion to the norm from where Archipelago op­er­ates. What that means is for the plat­form to main­tain a high aware­ness of whom it in­vites, in order to avoid the tra­di­tional pat­tern of dom­in­a­tion of a type of aca­demic actor (White Western Heterosexual Male to name only a few of their char­ac­ter­istics). Such prac­tice is the min­imum to be done to re­duce the vi­ol­ence of norm­ative pro­cesses and the os­tra­cisa­tion they create.

Léo­pold Lam­bert is an archi­tect and Editor of The Fun­am­bu­list.