Poster: Forests of Imaginations

For the longest time, the forest has been the motif for the unknown, the veering away from which has defined the civilizational foundation of the contemporary world. Ironically, the looming disbelief in the projections of modernity has pushed many to return to the forest - figuratively and literally. In its form, the forest stands as a critique then, to the clarifying visions of modernity on the one hand but lurks as a revivalist recluse on the other. As an ever changing ecosystem of possibilities that is agile and adaptive to emerging transformations, the forest is a place of quiet agreements that allows coexistence/overlap of multiplicity of biodiverse forms. It offers no single route for navigation, no clear perspective of destination, no directed illumination for focus. It is precisely these refracted conditions that allow a variety of life forms to thrive together within its ambit.

 
What could it mean to return to the forest as an enterprise of the future? How do we prepare ourselves to inhabit the forests of the future? ‘Forests of Imaginations’ aims at interrogating the continued physical and intellectual disciplining of the territory, as much as nuancing the territory of the discipline itself. This conference seeks to tease methods and possibilities to inhabit futures skipped or sidelined in the aggrandizing narratives of tomorrows. In picking up the leftovers, reconsidering the philosophical truncations while also treading the at-hand tools of the contemporary, what deviations could we productively exploit and orchestrate in order to imagine and inhabit our upcoming times? These imaginations themselves would constitute a forest that may allow us to lose ourselves in a rediscovery of the self. Through such an investigation, one may be able to articulate spatial insights that could help us meander into the landscapes of tomorrow. These shall prepare architecture to become meaningful within a field of shifting perspectives of inhabitation, altering visual densities, creeping digital fragments and transforming ecological futures.