︎ THE GEOFEMINIST MANIFESTO
Planetary Chronology is the record of the earth stored in the geo and the atmo. It’s all around us: extracted past is superheated and hyperformed into new creature comforts, and into the energy that enables our communication.
At the scale of the planet and the particulate, geo and atmo simultaneously record chronostratigraphic layers. The geo is a multiplicity of interconnecting geos- geology, geography, geopolitics. Atmo is the synthesis of all atmospheric scales from microscale to global scale. Atmo- contains traces of every breath created here on Earth.
Human Nature to produce, consume, and seek comfort [1] led to violent extraction on behalf of the lucky few [2]. This obscene [3] disruption of the natural record keeping brought about a new thin crust, encircling the planet with layer upon layer of technosphere [4]. Geosphere is instrumentalized for its own dismantling.
We deny this theft of the future. [5] Xenofeminsm called for addressing the Promethean responsibilities of Global complexities by acting “as collective agents capable of transition between multiple levels of political, material and conceptual organization.” [6] As architectural thinkers, we address this complexity through a panscalar oscillation. This oscillation endeavors to collect an archive of the recent past as it is inscribed into the planet. Geofeminism is oscillating between the scale of the particulate and the scale of the globe.
Geofeminism requires translation from pixel to kilometer and back again. The antipode is a peculiar friend in this pursuit. Your breath is in atmo, your feet are on geo: go even further into the earth, to understand each layer of deep time. Eventually you will find yourself at the other side, the antipode. Now, expand the scope until you encircle the earth. We have created a planetary section. This sectional understanding of the world is a mobilization of deep times in terms of representation, depth, and temporality. [7]
Geofeminism is a remaking of the world at hand, a redrawing of what we experience in perspective. The planetary section cuts through any number of spheres (geospheres, atmospheres, biospheres, technospheres); and objects like submarine internet cables in the Colombian trench, arctic walruses, a glacier, the Tianjin Municipality, a cloud of methane, all instances of Anthropocene, suspended within the medium [8] of planetary scale.
Geofeminism is a big world view. This planetary scale is in solidarity with the globe, to lead us “beyond the simplified comforts of a small-world framework.” [9] This approach is omni-disciplinary, drawing on the methods of geologists, climatologists, philosophers, archaeologists, and engineers to learn their strategies for collecting and analyzing evidence. To navigate requires an act of translation [9]; we translate into our own language, an architectural language, to articulate global processes in question, and to show planetary chronology as an architecture at the scale of the globe.