Turfiction studies multispecies architecture inspired by the Icelandic turf house. Fiction meets turf in a storytelling of a world to come that calls for a contingent and growing coexistence. We approach the island’s traditional architecture, which was brutally eradicated in the twentieth century, as a superorganism that consists of turf, complicated root systems, soil, fungi, microbes, water, lichen, stones, wood, insects, cows, sheep and humans. Acting as a wise interlocutor, the turf house impacts thinking about how future architecture can become accountable for forming new relations or “temporal belongings” (Bastian 2014) between species, reflecting upon the benefits of sustainable co-living (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017).

The project reflects on the turf house ontology, socio-material entanglements, multispecies relations, time, and space as essential elements for creating architectural complexes of interdependent cohabitation and ecosystem thinking and doing. Calling into being collaborative living with other-than-humans enhances human sensorial pathways and enriches understanding of the nonhuman sphere.

Absorbing, carrying and transmitting narratives and visions of architecture of multispecies cohabitation, the project celebrates “different modes of attentive immersion” (van Dooren 2016) on our journey to open practices of co-worlding and earthen politics. The project is carried out by anthropologists, ecologists, soil scientists, mycologists, botanists, microbiologists, artists and architects.

References

Bastian. M. 2014.  “Time and Community: A Scoping Study.” Time and Society 23(2), 137–66.
Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota.
van Dooren, T. Kirksey, E. & Münster, U. (2016). Multispecies Studies, Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness. Environmental Humanities 8(1),1-23.