ELASTIC | ABSORBABLE | SPACE: LOUKIA TSAFOULIA, Architect

Loukia Tsafoulia is the cofounder of PLB Architectural Design and Research Studio, and teaches at the College of Architecture and the Built Environment, at Thomas Jefferson University, where she has cofounded the Synesthetic Research and Design Lab.  We speak about the book she has edited, titled ‘Transient Spaces’, and her devotion to exploring belonging for migrant and refugee populations.  Her other works examine the connections between design, technology and science, specifically the human body and its interactions with the objects and place.  One project we speak about is now being exhibited at the the Venice Biennale.

Transcript

ELASTIC | ABSORBABLE | SPACE

Loukia Tsafoulia, Architect 

S1 EPISODE 12 TRANSCRIPT:        MAY 30, 2021

Loukia

“It acts as a three-dimensional cinema, where the movie watches you. The main structure is  interconnected fiberglass poles, that in turn stretch the fabric.  That fabric eventually is the skin, the veil of installation, actuated by the human presence, and by the interaction of the human with it. It has little peeking eye holes, that invite the participants through blinking lights, and sound patterns to come in. And, upon interaction, the participant's eyes are captured and then projected in real time, on the skin of this  body. The installation's  light and sound pattern  attract the participant to come closer, to approach, to engage, in that sensorial conversation.”

Nina

I'm Nina Freedman. And this is WHEREING. WHEREING explores where we are. It is dedicated to those who believe in the inherent right of belonging, and all the ways we feel we belong, and connect to ourselves, to each other, and the spaces that hold the stories where all of this comes alive. Where each experience of belonging is a work of art, created by chance or by design. Dare I ask, is belonging where you are not what matters most? WHEREING is the spatial story. Welcome.

I am speaking today with the prolific architect, Loukia Tsafoulia. She is the co-founder of PLB Architectural Design and Research Studio, and teaches at the College of Architecture and the Built Environment at Thomas Jefferson University, where she has co-founded the Synesthetic Research and Design Lab. The conversation you're about to hear, covers various multidisciplinary projects she is working on. We will speak first about the book she has edited and curated titled ‘Transient Spaces’, and her devotion to exploring belonging for migrant and refugee populations. Her other works examine the connections between design technology and science, specifically the human body and its sensory interactions with objects and place. Her design work has been exhibited in international design venues, and the project we will speak about is now being exhibited at the Venice Biennale.

Welcome, Loukia. It's so nice to have you. 

Loukia

Thank you, Nina. Thanks for inviting me. It's such a pleasure. 

Nina

I'm really excited to talk with you. To begin, because this podcast is predicated on home and belonging in many different ways, can you  give me a sense of your origins, where you were born? You're an international citizen, as I see it.

Loukia

Yeah, I mean, not as much as others, but my story is fairly linear. I guess. I'm from Greece.  I grew up  in a small city under the name Kerastini, which is in the Western part of Piraeus municipality. Piraeus is the big port city of Athens. So, it's by the water. And then as a college student, I went on to live in the center of Athens. It's not that far away from where  I was born and raised. And, I lived for many years in the neighborhood of Exarcheia, which is a really interesting neighborhood. It's a very active socio-politically, speaking neighborhood. It's the area where all of the urban arrests is always being manifested. So, I was in the middle of action.  It was also the area where our school was located. The National Polytechnic University of Athens, is spread out in some suburbs, but specifically the School of Architecture, it's in the very center. And that was always a political decision that was taken. And, there has been efforts in the years to move it outside of the center, but you know, the students and I guess the professors have been fighting their rights to the city, which was very nice. And, then I did spend a summer in Lisbon, in Portugal. Yeah, it was incredible. I went there with Erasmus academic exchange program and that was the very first time of developing a sense of homeyness outside of my country of origin. And, then that sense got amplified, of course, in 2010 when I came to New York City to do my masters. I did the advanced architectural design program at Columbia University in New York. Since then I've been based in the States. I was thinking that the sense of belonging is lately a feeling or a question maybe I have been confronted with quite a bit, more than earlier on. Quite a bit. Yeah. 

Nina

Yes. And, I think it's also in your work, right, which we'll talk about soon. You came to the States really to study, and you stayed . Was that a decision in the beginning? 

Loukia

Yeah. Things happened, actually. It definitely wasn't the plan, by no means. When I came, I didn't have any expectations after my studies. The only thing I really was interested in  is  this idea of discovering something different  culturally, but also, I guess I was excited with the program. I was excited with the more experimental point of view. It wasn't a European program. So for me, it was like a big cultural change, both in terms of architecture, but also in terms of the life, and then  by the end of the program, I guess it came naturally to kind of like stay around, and see what's up. To understand the city a bit more and you know, the first year became a second year and the second year, third, and then you find yourself 10 years after wondering, you know, where am I?  What am I doing? So, one thing brings the other, I mean I met my partner here, and suddenly we have a baby here and life moves on and we still don't feel that, that's the place. Right. We love New York and we love the States. But, at the same time, it's still that kind of  weird understanding of culture,  the right to be active participants or for society socially, politically, economically. I'm not a citizen, so, I don't vote in the States. So, that's something that sort of cost me. I mean, there's a sense of belonging, but at the same time, my participation is limited. So, that's always a very important consideration to  that sense of homeyness, and that sense of having the right to decide, and your voice to be heard. 

Nina

I felt after I lived in Europe for a long time, that from that point on, I became a person of two worlds. When I lived in Europe, often I had nostalgia for New York and not only the people, the energy, the way of being in New York, where London felt very sleepy. Actually for a lot of people, it's not, but compared to New York, it was pretty sleepy. And then, when I came back to New York, there was such a nostalgia for  Europe. I always felt split. You just live with that. 

Loukia

Yeah. It's very well put, that split is very well-put, but also the way you describe it, like the smells, the sounds, the energy, all of those sorts of things, are very important. They do make a difference. I also think that the very sense of topos, when I think of Greece, I think of course, of my family and my friends and my loved ones and my culture, but that very sense of topos, like the land. It sounds romantic, but as I grow, I'm very connected to it, like the smell of the land or the smell of the sea and, and things like that. It's really incredible how someone ends up missing these things. 

Nina

You're not the first Greek person that has told me that actually, about the connection to the land.   Let's jump into some of your work.  You edited this amazing book, Transient Spaces. What drove  you to get involved in that book?

Loukia

It starts with an interest, and having been always very connected and very sensitive  to concepts of migration, specifically forced migration concepts of displacement. They are not concepts. They are realities actually. Kerastini, the city I grew up in, where my family home is, and then, Drapetsona where I spent all of my school years as a student, as a teenager, are areas that migrant families were heavily relocated during the 1992 Minor Asia catastrophe. That was a huge, huge refugee movement. Actually, I remember I had classmates and friends that had roots in Armenia, in Southern Russia, Ukraine, Crimea, and  still, I have dear friends and family that are from Pontus, which is at the source of the Black Sea, magic places in my mind from all of the stories I've heard. And then, in 2011, when the Syrian war migration crisis manifested, I was shocked of course, and terrified of the bad practice and the inhumane handling  of a situation, so many powers involved in the war industry, and then the host countries, humanitarian agencies and humanitarian governance, as it sometimes becomes. So, you know, all of these forces  immobilized me, as the immobilized many people around the world. And then, during the spring of 2017, that I had the pleasure teach an advanced design studio, at the Spitzer School of Architecture, the City College of New York. And, that was a faculty research led studio. So, I developed the studio syllabus under the theme transient spaces, and we investigated how we can see the idea of shelter, or how we can build shelter in context of crisis. And then the winter of 2016, that was just prior to the spring studio, I was in Greece in my hometown, and I visited the newly created refugee camps, and then I used as part of the design studio where there's Schisto and Scaramagka, for people that might be interested  in looking at them more closely. So, those are again in the Western part of Athens. And, I was in touch with a dear friend engineer, that was working on the ground and in the refugee camps, and he was member of the Danish Refugee Council, that was an NGO operating within these camps. And I also was brought in touch through him with another engineer that was the deputy director at the time of the reception and identification service at the Greek Ministry of Migration Policy. And then, after I had a lot of discussions with them, and I was immersed in the camps, in the making of the camps, that the social life, all of the problems. Obviously,  around the idea of making a comp, which is very problematic, and even people that work within the camps recognize how distorted this, as an idea is. I also touched space with a colleague, he's an architect that was a member of the Norwegian Refugee Council. That was an emergency standby roster. And he was deployed by the UN in several places. So, I incorporated all of these voices, and all of these experience these people had, in the studio. That marked the beginning of the Transient Spaces book.

Now, with the conclusion of this study, I worked together with Samantha Ong, who is one of the co-editors, and was a fantastic student of mine in that studio. I invited her to keep with me, in the effort of inviting more people to contribute. We created an international call for contributions, essays, micro-narratives, projects. So, she was there all along. And then, in the process, I also joined forces with my dear colleague and comrade Suzan Wines, who is also co-editor. A bit later, she also worked with her students on developing educational tools of transition. So, the three of us curated this work, and we started creating that forum, that open dialogue around the things explored in the book. 

Nina

Wow. I had no idea about all of that. 

Loukia

Yeah, yeah. That's the story that gave birth to the work. 

Nina

In the book though it's a collection of essays. But it's not just a recording of information of what existed, right.  It was a call, I imagine, for questioning about resiliency. So, what was the intention behind that call, but also afterwards, what was the impact of these ideas put forward by all these writers? What came out of it?

Loukia

They call it was very open-ended, and that was very intentional as well, because we didn't want to do a book with chapters. We thought that that was counter-intuitive to the theme. We put out  general themes for investigation and, you know, belonging was one of them. Participation was another. In a way we also didn't want to only attract designers. In a way coming from the design standpoint, we did want to have works that might be more historical, or more sociological, or more anthropological. So, we did want it to have voices that come from very different backgrounds. The book was always in question for us. Will it be a book, meaning will it be a static body of work? Or, can it be more dynamic.  We ended up really solidifying it in a book, as the beginning of something else.  The last two years, we have organized a series of discussion panels. We have been very, very lucky to have very incredible voices talking about these themes. Michael Sorkin, of course, we miss dearly, we're still in disbelief of his passing, but he has been  really instrumental in all of the discussions, and in the making of this work. We were happy to hear  Sassen's point of view, Rahul Mehrotra contributed, Sean Anderson, the creator of New York City 's MOMA incredible exhibition, Harvard Breivik amongst many others, Julio Salecdo. They were all part of that evolving forum. So the book is the beginning  of a series of discussions. And, that's the evolution of that static format to something more dynamic, and we hope we can continue. Through all of those discussions, there was a lot of back and forth. We had people that we invited, the people I knew that they working  on these themes, that they are advocates and activists, and they're very, very active. We have people that that they were working on policymaking, they were working in camps, on the ground, but also we had the historians that were looking actually through the themes through analyzing moments in history that repeat themselves in a way. 

To me, if you just do the second part of your question, a few of the basic ideas that are emerging and they're very important. I feel them very personally,  is definitely the need to support more, more loudly, more meaningfully, and more in general, the expanding network of all of those many bottom up informal initiatives that are there.  They are taking place quite a lot, but we don't know about them.  There are many times, a response to the practices of humanitarian governance, that are very meaningful and have, zero financial support.  They happen through the support of the individual that comes and saves the collective. So, I think that's one of the  key ideas that keeps emerging that keeps surfacing by hearing stories, by analyzing situations, by kind of like having a forensic view to  those issues. Many of those ideas of activism are emerging and it's a pity, because they are not known. People don't know that many of those collectives are doing so much work behind the scenes.  Obviously, the main output of this effort is that the refugee question has no one answer. We can't talk about solutions necessarily, but we can talk about agency, right? So, it's not about generating a series of solutions, but really understanding a series of practices. I remember Deen Sharp, , in one of our discussions, he brought up a very interesting point that well, designers can do that much, and we need to understand what we can do. So, that's the beginning point, because many times we like to dream beyond our capacity, and  that's an asset that we might have, but at the same time, we don't sometimes realize where should we stop and really collaborate with other people, listen  more. And, he was actually calling for an urgent contribution to the politically charged debates around the figure of the refugee.  Those are very, very difficult, multifaceted approaches that are required to address those questions. It's very hard to talk about displacement and belonging by identifying the lenses of refugee versus migrant. I mean,  these are really key identifications that have been created. They're all policy creations.  Rahul Mehrotra, as a last point, that I carry with me, is his ideas of impermanence and how impermanence  obviously is bigger than permanence  and bigger than all of us, and how we are often obsessed with permanence, but how can we really see transience as an opportunity and  as a mobilizing force.

Nina

This debate is a vehicle for academics in sociology and architecture and various disciplines, to speak to this issue. Does the debate, after the book, include the refugees? 

Loukia

Yeah, that's a great question. And actually in a way, I was happy that this work was initiated, where it was initiated, because in the Spitzer School of Architecture, specifically the students selected my studio, those students  all had a story of immigration. Right? So, that to me,  started the work in a very interesting way. Also, I have to say that through the partners and people that were always along the way, in the making of the work, there was always a pushback, as you know, okay, you're academics. You want to make a book and I'm going to help you. But what else, what comes after that? So, there was always been there, the criticism. Okay. We all gathered together, but eventually who are we including? What voices can be included.  Yeah, so then, we did conduct  interviews. I was very lucky to be connected with these people and be able  to be in the refugee camps, to talk to people, to understand a little bit from the inside, the many, many complex situations that are arising and they are not only political, they're actually meantime social between the different cultures that are put together.  When you put an Afghan  person next to a Syrian person, that already means conflict. You need to hear those voices, as you very well say. In the book, we don't have an essay written by them, but we do have interviews. We have interviews with those who have been working on the ground, with these very people. These are the people that raised the most criticism  to the effort. But obviously, they were also the people that were the key supporters of it. So, I'm indebted to them. I feel very lucky to have had all of those critical voices. 

Nina

For many years I worked with Shigeru Ban very closely, and some of these questions came up also, in talking with him. So for example, what he would do is, he would always go to the place. Let's say if there was a natural disaster. I mean, often it was as a result of a natural disaster, such as a tsunami or an earthquake.  He would go and talk to the people and really find out what they needed, because he said that often people think people need shelter immediately. And, that certainly is a need, but it may not be what they are asking for. And, sometimes the shelter is then relocated to a far place. Like there was one area where they did fishing in a certain area, but the shelter was relocated somewhere else, where they couldn't actually have a livelihood, because they couldn't be fishing. So, it didn't work. When Italy had an earthquake, for example, he didn't go in and build shelter. He realized they needed a little concert hall. So he made a temporary concert hall, really to lift the spiritual hope. There was another church  in Japan, where he did that too.  In Africa, he went in and  they were being given these shelters by the UN, the tent. And, the tent, had aluminum poles, so it didn't work. Maybe you know all of this, right. They sell it for money. And then when they didn't have that, they started cutting down the wood in the forest, and they deforested the area around it. So the solution really was going in and looking what really works. It was very interesting to talk with him about all of this, and how he went in, on the ground, talking to the people first, what they need, and then having them build it with him. 

Loukia

Yeah, I think this is all the key, and what you were just saying, about shelter, how can we help as designers? These are super important ideas to explore. I remember, in Greece, 2017, 2018,  it was incredible, what was happening, the influx of people,  it was incredible. There were people coming from the islands to the  Piraeus port, which is where I grew up, and my family will go there at night to help people. And, they took in their house, for many months, actually almost a year, a family, there was a girl there with a newborn. She give birth in the trip. So, those little stories of  what can you do? You first need to be on the ground. You first need to understand. There's so much residential stock, in the center, in the hub where life is taking place, where human support can be offered. And, then this idea of relocating everyone somewhere in a camp, this is really not the solution. So, many of those ideas are explored in the book by academics, by historians, but they do have a very real basis. A basis of us all witnessing the failure of such solutions,  or practices. And, actually still now, in my grandmother's house, there's a refugee family that lives the past two years and, many other families did the same. So, I think these are the stories that eventually need to be heard, not by designers, by everyone, but we as designers, I think we need to expand our tools to realize those very important narratives, and how those narratives can inform us, in the making of shelter.  It's a difficult and complex issue. I mean, there's no doubt about it. Someone can never feel comfortable, you know, for just investigating it. I mean, we should all feel unsettled. 

Nina

“I am speaking today with Loukia Tsafoulia, whose works have focused both on belonging for refugee populations, and with the connections between design technology and science, specifically how the human body interacts with objects and place.”

Actually, you're working on a few things right now. You have a wonderful work, which is now  in  the Venice Biennale, which is part of the European Cultural Center Exhibition. This is a very different kind of project, but it's not something that you haven't been developing for a while as well. You're working with the Thomas Jefferson University, in collaboration with the synesthetic research and design lab, and you've created this traveling installation.  It's around the concept of synesthesia. So, please define synesthesia first.  

Loukia

Sure. So, synesthesia is a neurological condition. In a way, stimulation of one sensory pathway leads to an automatic connection with another sensory pathway. So, when one sense is activated, another unrelated sense is activated at the same time. People hear sound and instantaneously see yellow, or they see red. So, there is  a connection of senses that is triggered through a series of neurons, within our brain. Now, the title of our work is less of a direct reference to that actual medical neurological condition.  It's mostly interested in investigating the combined sensorial and cognitive aspects that make up an experience. And eventually, what are the potentiality of those aspects? So, we're creating a symbolic connection to the notion of synesthesia. 

Nina

Yeah. You talk about sense connections, but also disconnections, correct? 

Loukia

Yeah. That's a very, very interesting point. 

Nina

Can you describe what the installation looks like, and for the listeners here, we will have images of it. You will have links to the website to take a look at it, and you can also refer to it while we're speaking right now. 

Loukia

To start with, it's a responsive installation. It responds to the presence of the human participation. Formally, it's conceived as a deformed sphere. It's a central node of multiple connections, that is saved as a blob. It acts  as a  three-dimensional cinema where the movie watches you. Severino, my partner, who conceived the idea many years ago, but then together we developed it.  We started developing it a couple of years ago, and he always suggest this idea, this relationship,  of you sort of participating with that three dimensional cinema, but also that movie sort of participating you , from the inside out. It's approximately nine to ten feet. The main structure is six crossing triangulated, aluminum poles. They're kind of like the legs that hold together a series of rings. These are interconnected fiberglass poles, that in turn stretch very tightly the fabric. So, that fabric eventually is the skin somebody will experience. It's the veil of installation and also it's that analog domain that hosts all of the projections that come from the actual projectors, but also come from all of the light effects that are happening within that bigger blob. That skin  is actuated by the human presence, and by the interaction of the human with it. It has a series of portals, little peeking eye holes. And, those are the eyes of the installation that invite the participants through blinking lights and sound patterns to come in. And, upon interaction, the participant's eyes are captured and then projected in real time, on the skin of this artificial body.  I would say that the installation's fluctuating light and sound pattern effects, attract the participant in different ways to come closer, to approach, to engage in that sensorial conversation, but also, the installation glows from within. It makes synthesized electronic pulses and different tones. And, if no one is near it, like no human presence is around, it calls out for attention. It lets you know that it's waiting. Then, once you get closer to it, it starts making a series of sounds together with light patterns. The sound was very important component of the installation. I think we spent a tremendous amount of time trying to test and experiment.

Nina

Yeah. So I actually didn't realize that it had these little sounds that attract people.  If I was to describe it the way I see it. So, I come to a space. It's white, nine foot by 10 foot sphere. And it's got little holes in it, and it's making a little sound, right. A little light is flickering. I come near it and then it gets more active and more excited.  I'm not the only one who approaches. There are many holes and different heights. It's being activated by many people simultaneously. When I look into these little holes, my eyeball is projected on the interior skin, but it's visible from the outside as well. And, there's a sense of, depending on how close and how far I go, and how much I blink, there's this movement on the inside of many eyeballs together, as if we're almost under a microscope. So, it's almost like a horror film sometimes, but it's super interesting. As you were talking, you know what I was thinking about? I was thinking about the mating call of birds. They have this  language. And then you can hear them get more excited, when they come close, attract and then you capture. And it becomes a living organism. For anyone else that is there simultaneously, I'm aware of them, correct? 

Loukia

Or you might not be, because  you might not realize that you're part of that installation. You might not realize that in real time, while you're actually understanding the inner works of the installation, part of your body, specifically your eyeball is becoming part of the installation itself. You might not know. 

Nina

You don't see it?  

Loukia

I don't think you have the capacity to see really. You might capture something on the skin, but they inner part is very busy as well, a very complex artificial world.  So, very easily somebody can get lost in that inner work of the installation without realizing that they become part of the installation itself. So, it is a collective body of bodies, but not necessarily everyone discovers that. In a way, it is a collection of organs that are projected. They're layered, they are super imposed on top of each other and they make that collective self. But somebody might realize it in real time. Somebody not. There's also a live component. So, there's a live streaming on the web that in a way  documents all of those many interactions. And then, somebody in real time can really understand whether the installation has been very busy, or very quiet and so on.

Nina

An infinite scale. 

Loukia

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the idea of territoriality was definitely an important one, we wanted to address. It might not allow physical bodies within, but it does absorb them visually. So, for us, it is a message for our times.  And again, we do want to construct a narrative that moves away from the ideal form and more towards the idea of a performance of bodies that generate space, rather than a form, the generic space. We also did work to  evoke what is a responsive environment after all? What does it mean? Where does it come from? You know, what is smart? We're very critical to the whole notion of the smart.  So, we think that through historical reflection, we should be able  to expand our understanding of the use of computers with machines of  automated objects within our daily lives. And definitely synesthesia derives from that larger question of what is the process that links humans, machines and spaces, and how can we navigate it better to understand the non human versus human interactions, within our built environments?

Nina

Working with the Thomas Jefferson University, which I understand is also a medical facility, there's an underlying purpose in this research, isn't there? 

Loukia

Yeah, absolutely. So, together with Severino, it was a year and a half ago when we started initiating of the synesthetic research and design lab, within the college of architecture and the built environment at Thomas Jefferson university. And we found an exciting opportunity to see this platform as both prototyping and scholarly platform, where interactive design art, and emergent health sciences can meet. So, we have been  very happy to collaborate with the center for autism and neurodiversity, with actual patients that are on the spectrum.  We have been collaborating with the occupational therapy department of the university. So, we try to see  the crossings of these collaborations when it comes into  the works that relate senses, humans, machines, and the built environment eventually. So, we have a lot of support for our future projects from patients, from people that are under particular neurological conditions, and also medical field experts.

Nina

In bringing it to the larger scale of the Venice Biennale, which is international, culturally diverse, et cetera, what is your hope? 

Loukia

It is conceived as a traveling work, that we hope will engage a variety of people, variety of communities and places. We did want to initiate ways of re-thinking and engaging the notion of public. And, we see it as an event that is not curated. It's dynamic, it's unexpected that it does create a public and symbolic space that speaks to the idea of exchange. There's a lot of cultural information someone can extract, even demographic data.   So, we do hope that the installation could eventually, if we documented correctly, and set the stage of evaluative criteria and different objectives, we do hope that it can become a cultural project. But you also want to move on. As much as we love beginnings of those thoughts with the making of this project, we also are ready to move on  in works that build on top of this work. We actually see this as the first of the series of installations or prototypes. You know, you asked what do we expect from it? Maybe we don't expect something very specific. We love the idea of not expecting too much from it.  We already feel grateful that we're able to  put in practice some of the scholarly ideas that we have been investigating.  Both Severino and I, we have been very fascinated in looking at experiments of perception machines, as they used to call them, of the 1940s and the fifties. Those experiments were done by psychiatrists and neurophysiologists, by people in the medical fields, and they were trying to understand how the human brain works. So, there were building electromechanical perception devices that were able to  interact with the environment in very basic ways. So, you know, we've learned a lot by studying the work of these scientists. And again, it's considered to be quite unexpected in the field of architecture, because these researches are located in the periphery of the design field.

Nina

One of the things that you mentioned, which I thought was interesting is not having expectations. This goes back to something we were talking about before; the agency, the responsibility that designers feel. And, the relinquishing of that agency, the letting it go as a very critical point, which I think is extremely difficult for designers.  It happens all the time, whether we want it or not. Even if you design a building a place, anything, once you do it, it's not yours anymore. People can deface it, they can love it, people can tear it down.  It's over. And the ideas that live in you are the things that carry forward, perhaps into the next project, and the next project. That is live. You own what's in your own investigation. That's all we own.

Loukia

I couldn't agree more. And, I agree also with the way you put it. What really matters is the life after architecture, the way architecture has been appropriated by anyone.

Nina

“I am speaking today with Loukia Tsafoulia, whose works have focused both on belonging for refugee populations, and with the connections between design technology and science, specifically how the human body interacts with objects and place.”

Have you started another project? 

Loukia

Yeah. We recently got funds for starting a few more projects. These are all along the research lines that we just talked about. We're looking at two book publications, and they're all collective efforts with experimental psychologists, with behavioral health scientists, with people with neurodiversity. As you said before,  did you include the refugees? In these works we want very actively to make  authors people that are actually in the spectrum, or people that  have  neurological conditions and so on. So, one of the book publications is currently under the tentative title, Neurodiversity Built Community, Rethinking the Built Environment. This work follows a symposium we organized together with the center , for autism and neurodiversity, from the fall of 2020, a collection of thoughts that will speak about ideas of inclusivity and accessibility of our built environments, to people with diversities. And then, the second book publication is under the theme of performance as action. We are investigating ideas of the embodied mind, and this is a layered work. We're looking to include a series of drawing representations of those early perception machines, as I mentioned before, and simultaneously we want to include scholarly pieces that unfold the dynamics between scientific methods and design processes. And again, we feel very grateful that the past year we have  closely collaborated with all of these people that come outside of the design fields. And then in the more applied work, we just got the funds to develop a prototype. We call it 'soft'. It's going to be a pre-fabricated and deployable stress-relief, interactive prototype. Our target audience is, obviously everyone, but particularly understanding  the neurodiversity needs. This is a phased long-term project that is designed to understand the impact of sensory interactive environments on our health. And, we're working  in collaboration with medical field experts and people who have neurodiversities, but also their caregivers.  We came to understand that the patterns that people that care for people that are neurodiverse are really key factors in the making of an experience. So, we're looking to use this prototype also as a platform to create a series of evaluative criteria that could possibly inform the future making of such spaces.   Also, we're looking to create a common language between ourselves, we're coming with  design ideas, but also people from the sciences that really want to measure impact. They really want  to have a series of criteria that evaluate the environment in a very concrete way. 

Nina

Very ambitious without a scientific background. 

Loukia

Yeah. Yeah. And, we realize that. 

Nina

It feels to me like there's such a threading between a lot of your work,  from the ‘Transient Spaces’ to this project at the Biennale, to these new ideas, this sense of elasticity of territory, whether it's a small scale or a large scale, the need for elasticity, the question of elasticity, and even in your process, it's an elastic process, because it's very inclusive and sometimes unexpected and undetermined. The input that you're getting from many sources, this elastic collaboration,  is not typical, but very, very needed. 

Loukia

Yeah. Thank you, Nina. That's a very generous comment. I have to say, we're trying. 

Nina

Yeah. Very, very ambitious work and really fascinating.  I don't know how you sleep. 

Loukia

How do we all sleep? But, that's where they always wonder when I speak with friends and colleagues. You know, we enjoy.

Nina

That's what drives it. And, it's  important work.

Loukia

Yeah. Yeah. We're excited. We're excited to go to Venice to see the reactions and see how the project will be consumed by people. 

Nina

Yeah. Wonderful. Loukia, thank you so much for this conversation. I really look forward to listening to some of the talks and reading some of the books when they come out, and I hope our listeners will become engaged in your work as well.

Loukia

Thank you so much for the invitation.

Nina

“Dear listeners. Thank you for being here. I invite you to reflect on what you've heard today and send your thoughts or stories we would love to hear from you. Stay in touch on Facebook, Instagram, or on our website thewhereing.com. Subscribe free to WHEREING wherever you get your podcasts, so that you are alerted when the next episode airs. WHEREING is a pro bono initiative of Dreamland Creative Projects, which provides architectural and interior design services for the places where we live, heal, age and inspire. If you wish to have a design consultation, visit dreamlandcreativeprojects.com or email me nina@dreamlandcreativeprojects.com. Until we meet again, goodbye from WHEREING.”