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In The Pink

2020

In the Pink addresses the politics of the atmosphere through a study of the “pink death clouds”, which seasonally congregate in the arctic border-lands between Russia and Norway. Since the 1980s, practices of metal smelting have caused these ‘deathly’ clouds to form, leaving behind a toxic footprint and dead zones. Paradoxically, they also are characterised by a multitude of life. Inhabitants – including opportunistic fungi spores and mountain birch trees – are nourished by the cloud’s metallic air and acidic soils.

By devising architectural devices informed by these relations, In the Pink disassembles dichotomies of life and death, finding potential in the weird assemblage where both exist, in abundance, as a result of the other. The project produces typologies and devices that will eventually flourish within contaminated airs and recomposed soils. Opposing the normative paradigms of containment, or segregation, that follow spaces of toxicity and extraction, this project develops the possibilities of multispecies co-existence as a new form of futurity – new architectures found between the ground and the air.

Project initiated within the Royal School of Art School of Architecture, London, 2020. In The Pink was nominated for the RIBA Silver Medal Awards in London, 2020. The project has been presented at Beijing Bienalle (China), Pact Zollverein (Germany), The National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Universidad Veritas (Costa Rica). 



Horizontes Rosados 

In The Pink formed the basis of the book Horizontes Rosados. Arquitecturas viventes de una nube toxica [Pink Horizons. Living Architectures of a toxic cloud] which was edited by Carlos Segura and published in San Jose by Operaciones Editorial in 2021. 

This book develops an understanding of how a small molecule or entity can represent a much larger environmental situation, how a mushroom can represent the idea of a resilient ecology, and how a toxic aerosol particle can unfurl forms of politics and consumer economics.