SOBRE
N11
PLIEGO
Transspecies Kitchen
2025
TRANSSPECIES KITCHEN1
Andrés Jaque
SECCIÓN PLIEGO
SOBRE N11 01/2025
1. Transspecies Architecture
Architecture is not about space, nor is it about form. Architecture is how different forms of life enact their physical, neuronal, and metabolic entanglement – how they constitute themselves as inseparable. Architecture is how heterogeneous entities coproduce each other as bodied togetherness. Architecture is the making of transspecies and more-than-human envirobodiments. It is the making of the fleshy and the mineral, the technological and the biological indistinguishable. Any given body is a collective. Any given body is an assembly of diverse forms of life and other-than-life. Bodying is bodying-collectiveness. Bodies infiltrate other bodies and are infiltrated by living and nonliving entities. They become environment and climate. Climate is environments, bodies, land, minerals, earthiness, wetness, and technologies becoming enacted-togetherness. Climate is the architecturalization of bodies, land, minerals, earthiness, wetness, and technologies. Any existence is bodyenvironmental.
2. The Politics of Transspecies Kitchening
Kitchening is less physical than ecological; it is an affirmation of the collective process of transspecies life-making. Cooking, digesting, growing, and decomposing are all the same: an alliance between different forms of life. Kitchening is the realm of collective living. It is evidence for the impossibility of individual life. Kitchening is the architectural evidence of the impossibility of zipped-up bodies. As such, the ultimate form of kitchening is zymology. Yogurt. Sauerkraut. Cheese. Ceviche. Dry-cure salami. Sourdough. Dill pickles. Hot sauce. Vanilla pods. Cider vinegar. Kefir. Beer. Kombucha. Kvass. Perry. Tibicos. Wine. Pulque. Sake. Yeast. Chocolate. Garum. Surströmming. Worcestershire. Kimchi. Nattõ. Tempeh. Kumis. Curado. These alliances are humanly sensed as taste, smell, intoxication, euphoria, sleepiness, drowsiness, dyspepsia, being high, flatulence, diarrhea, heartburn, acidity, intolerance. Kitchening is a way to increase the collectiveness of intestines. Our kitchen is not fueled by gas, nor by electricity. It is fueled by carbohydrates. Transspecies kitchening is the art of counting energy out of molecular sociability. Chewing, grinding, breaking down, splitting, salivating, moistening, lubricating, ingesting, swallowing, churning, decomposing, fermenting, incorporating, engulfing, phagocytosing, absorbing, infiltrating, composing, decomposing, dividing, metabolizing, circulating, farting, burping, emanating, fluxing, evacuation, defecating, urinating, diluting are all part how bodies, societies, ecosystems are produced. Iron, cooper, zinc, chromium, fluoride, Iodine, manganese, sellenium, sulfur, calcium, sodium are needed for human stomachs to digest. Kitchening is how the mineral and the biological become inseparable.
These alliances are the ultimate form of politics. Architecture is bodyenvironmentalized politics. The cosmopolitics on which any worlding is founded. The politics that queerness, transness and political ecology explore and enact. These forms of politics exceed the politics of human-centered spoken words. In them, viruses, bacteria, fungi, minerals, technologies, human and more-than-human brains… they all participate. These are the cosmopolitics that the architecture we practice at the Office for Political Innovation operate in.
Differing from politics of spoken words, bodyenvironmentalized politics are hardly perceived by humans. They are diluted in bodies and environments. They are embedded and therefor are hardly paid attention to.
The architecture of bodyenvironmentalized politics exceeds the distinction between the objectual and the performed. It is both setting and performance. It is setting and performance as inseparable. It is not built. The architecture of bodyenvironmentalized politics is enacted.
3. A Setting
The post-carbon Transspecies Kitchen dilutes the boundaries between cooking, eating, and decomposing in a continuum of molecular progression. Its material setting is produced out of a collection of heterogeneous pieces of stone thrown off as waste by the marble extraction industry. Only 30% of stones extracted in quarries is industrially used; the rest is immediately characterized and processed as waste. The Transspecies Kitchen challenges industrial waste making by recirculating and giving value to what was previously disposed of. Stones are minimally transformed to become part of the Transspecies Kitchen. No other materials than the stone itself is used. This is an architectural strategy founded on rawness that aligns with the kitchening strategy, inviting bodies, communities, and territories alike to step back from industrialization and waste-making.
4. A Performance
The following are found and collected in the vicinity of the setting:
5. Back in the setting:
– Pine needles are smashed and mixed with the kombucha
– Apples are squished in the fountain and moved to the pickles piece;
– Onions are cut and a preparation of pickles is made with the acid, to make chimichurri
– Preparation of the collected soil and clay on the pickles piece, mixing it with salt, pepper, and herbs
– Marinating of the mushrooms in acid smashed leaves and apples
– Leftovers go to fermentation pot
– Cups and tools are washed and placed in the baskets by using juniper benches
– Left kombucha is sprayed on the soil
– Remaining apple left on the ground.
6. Coda
I am writing this as a non-zipped up human. We are a more-than-human body writing something that other more-than-human bodies will read. And still, we humans deeply believe that we are zipped-up humans. Architecture has been the art of making humans believe that zipped-up bodies are possible. Vets, slaughterhouses, butchers, locks in bathroom doors, toilets, toilet paper, ventilation systems, shafts, sanitary systems, table ware, dining protocols, good manners: these are the architectures that make possible for humans to see themselves as exceptional individualities. What if architecture had been the art of allowing humans not to face the trauma of their ecosystemic condition?
What if architecture had been the art of encapsulating humans as individuals? Architecture being the art of making Tupperware architecture to produce the human body as plasticized. Architecture could have been plastified architecture. But there is dissidence to this. Not all architecture is plastic architecture. Kitchening is a site for bodyenvironmentalized dissidence.
The hegemony of PLASTIC ARCHITECTURE might be starting to die.
Let us welcome the TRANSSPECIES ARCHITECTURE.
Andrés Jaque
Andrés Jaque is Professor and the Dean of Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. He has also been director of the Advanced Architectural Design Program at GSAPP, and visiting professor at Princeton University and The Cooper Union. Andrés received his PhD in architecture from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid, where he also received his M. Arch. He has been an Alfred Toepfer Stiftung’s Tessenow Stipendiat and Graham Foundation grantee. In 2018 he co-curated Manifesta 12 in Palermo and he is the Chief Curator of the 13th Shanghai Biennale, Bodies of Water. His books include Superpowers of Scale (2020), Mies y la gata Niebla: Ensayos sobre arquitectura y cosmopolítica (2019), More-Than-Human (with Marina Otero and Lucia Pietroiusti) (2020), Transmateria Politics (2017), Calculable (2016), PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society (2013), Different Kinds of Water Pouring into a Swimming Pool (2013), Dulces Arenas Cotidianas (2013), Everyday Politics (2011), and Melnikov. 1000 Autos Garage in Paris 1929 (2004). His research work has been included in publications like Perspecta, Log, Thresholds and Volume.
Footnote
1 “The Transspecies Kitchen” is an ongoing architectural project designed and built by Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation in partnership with M-Marble Project. It was developed and produced for the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale, curated byLydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou. (Volver al texto)
TRANSSPECIES KITCHEN
Andrés Jaque
DOI: 10.30827/sobre.v11i.32514
Cite as: Jaque, Andrés. 2025. «Transspieces Kitchen”. SOBRE 11. https://doi.org/10.30827/sobre.v11i.32514
Citar como: Jaque, Andrés. 2025. “Transspieces Kitchen”. SOBRE 11. https://doi.org/10.30827/sobre.v11i.32514