This session is also an event accompanying the Ripple Ripple Rippling exhibition.

Jesse Darling is an artist who writes, lives, and works. His research is concerned with the attempt to make visible the unconscious of European petro-colonial modernity through the history of technology and the production of ideology, or the objects and ideas with which we make up the world. In sculpture and installation he has taken up this enquiry using something like a materialist poetics to explore and reimagine the worldmaking values of that modernity. He is also interested in the role of spirituality as a structuring matrix for secular social life, and his practice takes seriously the idea that intuition, dreams, pathologies and folklore all have something important to tell us about the world. If there is a formal theme that runs through his work it is the acknowledgement of fallibility and fungibility as fundamental qualities in living beings, societies and technologies, which extends to the “mortal” quality of empires and ideas as a form of precarious optimism - nothing and no-one is too big to fail. Taking vulnerability and entanglement as a fact of life lends itself to a politics and a practice of community and coalition: Darling has been part of countless community-led projects and organizations and continues to research ways of being-with as praxis. Correspondence and dialogue form an important part of his research process. Darling also participated in the 58th Venice Biennale, and was awarded the Turner Prize in 2023.

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng works across architecture, anthropology, and filmmaking. Her practice follows drifting bodies—from rural migrant workers to forms of water—to confront intensified social injustice and ecological crisis. Cyan is a Harvard GSD 2023 Wheelwright Prize fellow for TRACING SAND and Canadian Centre for Architecture’s 2024–25 CCA-Mellon Multidisciplinary Researcher on field research as a land-dependent practice. Her work has been exhibited internationally as part of Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (2020–2022) and Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), among others. Cyan holds a PhD by Design from the Architectural Association and currently teaches at the Royal College of Art in London.

Chen Zhan is an architect, anthropologist, and independent filmmaker, trained at the Architectural Association and SOAS University of London respectively. Since 2019, Chen has used film as a collaborative medium to conduct long-term research-oriented projects. Her projects include ORCHID, BEE and I, a fictional ethnography reflecting on personal and collective experiences of living through the climate crisis and the Covid pandemic, and RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING. As a registered architect, Chen has worked on various award-winning projects across scales and sectors internationally since 2011, including the Maggie’s Cancer Care Center in Leeds, UK. Chen is currently part of the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s CCA-Mellon multidisciplinary research group.

Image: Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, “Marker in the Mekong River,” 2024, Laos-Thailand Border.

Please get in touch to let us know of any access requirements that you might have and how we can best accommodate these. If you are unable to attend physically but would like to participate in the event remotely please email publicprogramme@aaschool.ac.uk