Migration, evolution and science begin as an image – a figment of the mind emerging from courage, fear and fascination. It has led to the greatest quests and failures in history. What lies behind the mountain, across the stream, in the depths of the earth and towards the sun? Between dreams and a distant reality, the living have wandered, charting the earth in steps and following maps embedded in stars.

These encounters with landscapes and forms have intrinsically forged the world we know. It has also stoked curiosities for those that are hidden, perhaps frozen in ice; and the ones that are emerging as possible futures. Starting as signs, drawings and eventually stories and songs – these knowledges of ritual, remembrance and remedy – have been transmitted and translated across time and region. They have consistently challenged the divisions of culture, propagated by nations and borders, to percolate and spill. Through gaps, cracks and fissures – ideas of audacity and promise have seeped and survived. To believe, and to mutate, are part of our shared existence - medical advancement developed with conflict and war, vaccines to train immunities and the future with genome editing – reframe rituals and processes of survival.

The landscape is the dominion of natural forms, set into rhythms of subsistence and conviviality. The ambition of architecture to be natural or “be one” with nature, is impossible. To lay concrete, reclaim, land-fill and terraform will always remain an intervention, and an intrusion – synthetic and forms against nature – that will eventually slip off the soil, sink or collapsing into the ground that holds it. The only thing that will and will not remain constant is the landscape – changing, but always the surface.

Surface Encounters and Strange Beings bring together ideas that re-frame land, process and rituals of survival; and evolution – thinking through ideas of revolution, resistance and considered optimisms.

Mario D’Souza