Somatic Architecture in the Mediterranean Coast

We propose to look at the territories where the architectures of leisure time are located in their relationship with non-humans. Specifically with the bio-constructors who have actually built part of our coasts.

The research in architecture, landscape and ecology based on somatics, tries to see these border ecosystems – between water and land – as places of contact and overlapping of different organisms, bodies and situations where telluric organisms give way to marine organisms. It is interesting to compare how some bio-constructors, such as corals, calcareous algae and vermetids, build habitats for other beings in their action of existing, and what is more, they build territories and the land we walk on. Marine organisms construct the telluric. However, this heritage is not always revealed or taken into consideration. In these beings, their own bodies are structures that build the coasts. In this sense they bring us many threads of investigation and comparison with the politics of bodies and their relationship with the architectures of free time. The proposal identifies enclaves of virtuous and non-virtuous relations with bio-constructors, analysing what architectures are related to these links and what bodily imaginaries they sustain. Cycles of life and of construction and destruction are imbricated on different temporal scales. Bioconstructors impose on us the scale of the evolution of ecosystems but also the scale of our interspecies body.

In terms of related architectures, we observe not only past situations but also future potentials in the new ecologies that could be imbricated in constructive, spatial and performative terms.

In terms of bodily imaginaries, it is important to consider them because bio-constructors, such as corals for example, propose diverse political practices and are paradigms of ambiguous bodily configurations, genders and sexualities. This in the environment of free time and greater laxity of norms that are attached to the territories of sun and beach is especially interesting in the possible politics of space and the body that the architectures associated with the enclaves of encounter between humans and bioconstructors propitiate. It is also an opportunity to reformulate conceptions on which sun and beach architectures are based and to configure a multi-species reconstruction in a future agenda.

Bio-constructors’ platforms are seriously threatened by the passage of tourists over them, the temperature of the sea and lack of knowledge. Yet they constitute numerous heritages of constructions made (and designed) by non-humans.

The invisibility to which the bodies of the bio-constructors and their constructions (who support and construct us with their actions) are subjected, is sadly parallel to that of other human border bodies. Migrant bodies. This line of somatic research focuses on disadvantaged bodies that have seen the sea as a tragic passage and tries to give them support and visibility. At the same time, it works with the privileged bodies of the sun and the beach to make them aware that the basis of many of their needs rests on the skin of others. Border bodies that the somatic architecture of infrastructures and borders wants to support.

The bio-constructors incarnate in their bodies these multiple politics of the border and its architectures, and are the hinge of awareness between migrant and coastal bodies.

In short, the question is to analyze and prototype Somatic Architectures, which we define as those capable of reacting to the vicissitudes of the bodies that inhabit them, whether they are human or not. The focus will be on the friction line of the coast where the platforms of the bio-constructors in the Mediterranean and the human constructions converge and where the bodies of both are in proximity and co-constitution.

We show here some of the maps belonging to the first phase of the research developed in the Diploma Thesis of the San Pablo CEU University and in the Landscape Course of the University of Cyprus.

In the project we studied borders at the somatic, physiological and biopolitical level, as well as at the territorial level. We distinguished border ecologies in the Cypriot Buffer Zone (an area of particular ecological and political characteristics), border ecologies between the sea and the land (where the bio-constructors, with unique somatic and material qualities, settle) and ecologies of the organic and the organic through the great fossils (some mountains, once, were once alive).

The bio-constructors stand as hinge bodies of all of them.

***