Disrupt/Displace: Translating Territory

Disrupt/Displace was both a Venice Architectural Biennale Session and a "Report from the Front" on the Dakota Access Pipeline: simultaneously a critique, a performance, and a proposal presented in four parts: PART 1: Searching for the Front (Iowa), PART 2: Constructing the Front (Iowa), PART 3: Reporting the Front (Venice), PART 4: Assessing the Front (Venice). Alejandro Aravena's curatorial statement for the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, "Reporting from the Front," provided context for Disrupt/Displace, which emerged from doubts about the possibility of political resistance in the practice of architecture. 1 As a project Disrupt/Displace serves as a tool for understanding both architecture's complicity in perpetuating spatial forms of political oppression and as a method that enables architects to resist disciplinary nihilism and defensiveness when confronted with intractable political issues.