Office for Political Innovation: Transmaterial Politics

Andrés Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation’s work redefines,the political status of architectural materiality. Rather than focusing on isolated objects, their work explores daily life as the result of the interaction between multiple entities, operating at different scales and temporalities. Bodies, buildings, social media, vegetal species, and natural resources are ensembled in shared projects to which architecture, as a political practice, contributes through intervention, empowerment, rearticulation, disobedience, and confrontation. In the Office’s work, matter is a multiple, interscalar, and performative reality: a “transmateria,” resulting from the displacement from the bodily to the territorial, from the biological to the geographical, from the offline to the online.

“Transmaterial Politics” presents a selection of the work developed by Andrés Jaque and the Office for Political Innovation, organized around four constellations of projects, each gathering multiple formats and methodologies to explore the ways that architecture participates in four notions of the political: Sweet Domestic Arenas, Cosmopolitics, Performing Publicness and Sex and the So Called City.