Transvaluation: Making the world matter. International symposium in search for alternative, cooperative environments of knowledge, creation and invention, of "Making and Thinking"

Report, 2016

In the current measurement- and indicator-driven knowledge culture, research in architecture, art and several disciplines within humanities and social sciences may succumb to economic or scientific models, or be separated from important contexts of invention, risking to reduce research largely to standardized reproduction. Responding to the current proliferation of evaluation systems and the dominant culture of measurement that comes with it, the Transvaluation international symposium, May 21-22 2015, searches for alternative, cooperative environments of knowledge, of creation and invention, of ‘making and thinking’, and ways to trans- and re-value research cultures from within. The ambition was a high quality event with top level keynote speeches, small format seminars and collective forum discussions, with the intent to start a broad debate addressing fundamental strategic research questions across disciplinary borders, and to instigate possibilities for change. Key note speakers were international experts in social, global anthropology, Arjun Appadurai; art researching practice and doctoral education, Andrea Phillips; and speculative realism and material objects, Graham Harman. The symposium focused two major themes, Poetics and Politics of Value, referring to the (re-)making of values, both in artistic and architectural practice and in human scientific research, and their related political and systemic aspects. These themes were examined through two conceptual lenses: Worlding (shaping the world, transforming matter) and U-topos (space for speculative thinking and making). The text is an introduction to published proceedings, where the ambition is to search for ways in which architecture, art, philosophy, anthropology and other areas of research may challenge, together, the very concept and formation of knowledge, stretching and enriching it, hence “transvaluing” material and spiritual research cultures from within, disclosing alternative approaches and strengthening their logics of argumentation within the interdisciplinary frame, with potential to change its systemic conventions.