Transversal Alliances

The Transversal Alliances symposium takes the process-oriented, transdisciplinary approach explored in as its starting point while going beyond the specific Chinese context.

In a world where debates are becoming increasingly divisive, transversal alliances are needed more than ever to defy flattened narrative and reductive abstraction. Through presentations, conversations, screenings and performative sections, this symposium shares boundary-pushing practices across architecture, anthropology, filmmaking and performance. Grounded in the complex, messy realities of life, this gathering charts ways of confronting the fractured, disjunctive conditions of all our existences, while affirming how one’s life is intricately connected to another.

With contributions from the Canadian Centre for Architecture (associate director Francesco Garutti), London’s Delfina Foundation (visual and performance artist Moe Satt and curator Erin Li), artist filmmaker Laura Huertas Millán, Prof. May Adadol Ingawanij (co-director of the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster), Dr Stephen Putnam Hughes (Film Officer & Festival Director at the Royal Anthropological Institute), editor and curator Shumi Bose (chief editor at KoozArch), the Ripple Ripple Rippling project team (Jingru Cyan Cheng, Chen Zhan, Mengfan Wang), and AA Director Ingrid Schroder.

PROGRAMME

11am Introduction

11am–12.30pm RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING AS A POINT OF DEPARTURE
Jingru (Cyan) Cheng & Chen Zhan
In conversation with Ingrid Schroder and May Adadol Ingawanij

Cyan and Chen will share stories of ‘Rippling’ – Pond, Yard and Pinewoods, while unpacking the evolving methods and media of communication of this work over a decade, from architectural documentation to participant observation to performative improvisation to collective happening. They will then be in conversation with AA Director Ingrid and writer and curator May to further explore transdisciplinary practices.

12.30pm Lunch at the outdoor temporary house foundation on Bedford Square

1.30–3pm BODY & THE PERFORMATIVE
Mengfan Wang and Moe Satt
In conversation with Erin Li

This panel brings together theatre director and choreographer Mengfan, visual and performance artist Moe, and curator Erin to explore their shared interest in how everyday performative expressions inspire choreography and art making. Through a lecture performance, Mengfan will attempt to relay a collective image, mother – woman – granny, found and felt in Shigushan village. The lived histories and spiritual practices of female bodies are transformed into a series of movements. From there derives shared memories of ‘bitterness’ (ku 苦), alluding to ‘being old’ and ‘growing old’ in the present. Moe will screen his short video Hands Around in Yangon (2012), introduce his new solo exhibition Rest the Thumbs on the Cheekbones at Delfina Foundation, and detail how his observation of everyday hand gestures in various cultures developed into recent experiments in expanding embodiment through instructions, participatory installations, and performances. Moe, Mengfan and Erin will then be in conversation to explore the intersections and varying contexts of their practices.

3pm Break

3.15–4.45pm FILM & THE ETHNOGRAPHIC
Laura Huertas Millán and May Adadol Ingawanij
In conversation with Stephen Hughes

This panel will start from an excerpted screening of artist filmmaker Laura’s experimental shorts in which architectural elements play a central role: The Labyrinth (2018), Jeny303 (2018) and Aequador (2012). The role of architecture in these works serves as a starting point to unpack the weaving together of ecology, fiction, historical enquiries, and diasporic trajectories via methods intersecting cinema and experimental ethnography. The unpacking will be carried out through a conversation with writer and curator May with interjections of May’s long-term work on Animistic Apparatus, a curatorial research project committed and connected to Southeast Asia exploring the relational, futurist, and agentive forms of artists’ cinema via exhibitions, screenings, artistic research field trip, commissioning, talks and publications. Animistic Apparatus places Southeast Asian contemporary artists’ moving image practices in constellation with the region’s animistic practices including itinerant film projection rituals performed as spirit offerings. Laura and May will be joined by RAI Film Festival Director Stephen to further explore the relationship between their practices and anthropology.

4.45pm Break

5–6pm ARCHITECTURE, FILM & THE CURATORIAL
Francesco Garutti / Canadian Centre for Architecture
The Canadian Centre for Architecture presents Into the Island (2024, 41 min), the first documentary of Groundwork, a CCA ongoing film series on contemporary ecological practices. Into the Island follows architect Xu Tiantian during preliminary site visits on Meizhou Island. Famous as the site which gave birth to the cult of the sea goddess Mazu, the island is an environment where religious pilgrimages and mass tourism, traditional farming techniques, and strict conservation policies co-exist in a fragile balance. This screening opens a discussion on the CCA’s approach to cinema as a curatorial tool within their research and exhibition projects.

6–7pm TRANSVERSAL ALLIANCES
Roundtable moderated by Shumi Bose, bringing together Chen Zhan, Erin Li, Francesco Garutti, Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Laura Huertas Millán, May Adadol Ingawanij, Mengfan Wang and Stephen Hughes.

7pm Drinks Reception

PARTICIPANTS

Chen Zhan is an architect, anthropologist, and independent filmmaker, trained at the Architectural Association and SOAS University of London respectively. Chen uses film as a collaborative medium to conduct long-term research-oriented projects. Her projects include ORCHID, BEE and I, a fictional ethnography reflecting on personal and collective experiences of living through the climate crisis and the Covid pandemic, and RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING. As a registered architect, Chen has worked on various award-winning projects across scales and sectors internationally, including the Maggie’s Cancer Care Centre in Leeds, UK. Chen is currently part of the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s CCA-Mellon multidisciplinary research group.

Erin Li is Curator at Delfina Foundation, leading on the delivery of residencies, exhibitions, and public programmes. Her recent curatorial practice centres around liveness, from street dance and live art, live culture in fermentation, to transforming everyday relations, processes and vulnerabilities into interdisciplinary art projects. She was previously Asymmetry Curatorial Fellow at Whitechapel Gallery. Before relocating to London, she was Associate Curator at Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong, where she realised numerous exhibitions, including curating Sipping Dreams (2023), emo gym (2022), and co-curating trust & confusion: Tino Sehgal (2021). She also worked as Art Manager at Duddell’s (Hong Kong and London) and Project Researcher and Development Coordinator at Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong).

Francesco Garruti is Associate Director Programs at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). A curator, editor, and writer, he uses art and architecture to activate cross-disciplinary research. He developed the CCA exhibition and research projects The Things Around Us: 51N4E and Rural Urban Framework (2020–21), Our Happy Life: Architecture and Well-Being in the Age of Emotional Capitalism (2019), and Out of the Box: Gordon Matta-Clark (2019–21). He was formerly CCA Emerging Curator (2013–14), where he developed Misleading Innocence, a curatorial and editorial investigation of the relations among architecture, technology and politics.

Ingrid Schroder is Director of the Architectural Association School of Architecture.

Jingru (Cyan) Cheng works across architecture, anthropology, and filmmaking. Her practice follows drifting bodies—from rural migrant workers to forms of water—to confront intensified social injustice and ecological crisis. Cyan is a Harvard GSD 2023 Wheelwright Prize fellow for TRACING SAND and Canadian Centre for Architecture’s 2024–25 CCA-Mellon Multidisciplinary Researcher on field research as a land-dependent practice. Her work has been exhibited internationally as part of Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (2020–2022) and Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), among others. Cyan holds a PhD by Design from the Architectural Association and currently teaches at the Royal College of Art in London.

Laura Huertas Millán weaves together ecology, fiction, historical enquiries, and diasporic trajectories, developing a multifaceted practice at the crossroads of cinema, art, poetry, experimental ethnography, and research. Born in Bogotá, she immigrated to France, graduated from Beaux-Arts de Paris, Le Fresnoy, and earned a PhD from PSL University (SACRe program). Her films have been shown at major festivals like Berlinale and won prizes at Locarno, FIDMarseille, Videobrasil... She co-founded Counter Encounters in 2019 and became co-chair of BARD College’s MFA Moving Image Department in 2022. In 2024, she was the laureate of the Aware Prize (Nouveau Regard), and won the Ulrike Crespo After Nature Prize.

May Adadol Ingawanij | เม อาดาดล อิงคะวณิช is a writer, curator, and teacher. She works on Southeast Asian contemporary art; de-westernised and decentred histories and genealogies of cinematic arts; avant-garde legacies in Southeast Asia; forms of future-making in contemporary Global South artistic and curatorial practices; aesthetics and circulation of artists’ moving image, art and independent films belonging to or connected with Southeast Asia. She is Professor of Cinematic Arts and Co-director of the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media, University of Westminster. She writes in Thai, English, and in translation, for a wide range of academic and arts publications. Her recent curatorial projects include the 69th Flaherty Film Seminar – To Commune, Legacies, and Animistic Apparatus.

Mengfan Wang is an independent theatre director and choreographer, with training in the history of art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, and dance studies at the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz, Cologne. Seeking to explore performative expressions of ordinary people, her dance theatre practice engages middle-aged women and children through a collaborative rework of daily acts and recently focuses on ageing bodies by working with retired ballet dancers. Mengfan is selected as “Dance Hopeful (Hoffnungsträger)” by German dance magazine tanz in its yearbook 2018. Commissioned by the Centre Pompidou and the West Bund Museum Shanghai, her latest work Narrative Fountain was shown as part of Women in Motion 2023.

Moe Satt (b. 1983, Yangon, Myanmar, lives and works in Amsterdam) is a Burmese visual and performance artist who uses his own body as a symbolic field for exploring self, identity, embodiment, and political resistance. He is part of a renowned generation of experimental contemporary Burmese artists who overcame government censorship and oppression to engage with conceptual art. Many of his works address provocative social and political issues through hand gestures and movements. His works have been collected by the Tate Modern, Singapore Art Museum, Kadist Foundation, and TBA21. He recently completed an artist residency at Rijksakademie (2022–24). His first European solo exhibition Rest the Thumbs on the Cheekbones will take place at Delfina Foundation from 1 October to 17 November 2024.

Shumi Bose is an architectural historian, curator and teacher. She is a Senior Lecturer in Architecture at Central Saint Martins, and also teaches at the Royal College of Art, the AA and Syracuse University. Shumi is also Chief Editor of Koozarch, an online journal of architectural research. She has worked as curator at the Royal Institute of British Architects and at the Venice Biennale and contributes to publications including PIN UP, Log and Metropolis. She serves as trustee of the Architecture Foundation and runs Holdspace, a non-institutional platform for non-curricular architectural discussions.

Stephen Putnam Hughes is currently Film Officer and Film Festival Director at the Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI) in London, UK. He earned his PhD at the University of Chicago and taught for several decades at SOAS, University of London. His specialist interests focus on the Anthropology of Media with an emphasis on documentary and ethnographic film. And his research and regional expertise in the cultural history of mass media and the performing arts in Tamil-speaking south India. He is currently working to curate the next RAI FILM Festival in 2025, which will be held 27-30 March 2025 at the Watershed Cinema, Bristol UK and online in April. He is also organising an accompanying online conference on Visual and Multimodal Anthropology from 28 April to 2 May 2025.

The symposium accompanies the exhibition in the AA Gallery and installation on Bedford Square.

Please get in touch to let us know of any access requirements that you might have and how we can best accommodate these. If you are unable to attend physically but would like to participate in the event remotely please email

Image: Chen Zhan, “Granny’s chair in the yard,” 2023. Shigushan Village, Wuhan, China.

Supported by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and Huazhong University of Science and Technology School of Architecture and Urban Planning.

Supported in-kind by the Canadian Centre for Architecture and Delfina Foundation.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Architectural Association, 36 Bedford Square, London, United Kingdom