Pressure Points: Risk - Jess Meyers / RIOT, MAS UTD

“To emphasize (...) dubious uses of risk is perverse, a dirty way of talking about a
clean scientific subject”
Mary Douglas, Risk and Blame, 36.

As the baseline condition of so many territories shaped by extractive industries, administrative delay, and climatic instability, risk is prevalent. Yet ecological risk—pollution, fires, floods, heatwaves, droughts—is still presented as problems to be solved rather than conditions to be inhabited. This also speaks to an outsourcing of risk through externalized consequences of spatial injustice. Banks, developers, material supply chains, normative institutions, subcontracting hierarchies —all contend with calculated risk. This edition of Pressure Points asks us to unpack what it means to live with the risk, how it is managed, commodified, quantified, invented, politicized, instrumentalized, tamed, and to think, design, cohabitate intellectually and physically with it. The assembled guests should help us think and build literacy toward developing tools for living within uncertain territories and futures.

Jess Meyers
Monday, November 16, 17:00 CET

Jess Meyers is an urbanist whose practice includes work as an editor, writer, podcaster and curator, and is a tenure-track Assistant Professor at Syracuse University. Previously, Myers was an assistant professor of architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. She has worked as an archivist, translator and analyst in New York and Paris. Myers served as a co-steward of the Architecture Lobby’s New York chapter and as the series editor for SEIU’s book series, Taking Freedom. Her research takes many forms, including a variety of multimedia platforms, which she uses to explore politics and residency in urban conditions. Myers’ podcast, Here There Be Dragons focuses on the intersection of identity politics and security policy in public space through the eyes of New Yorkers, Parisians and Stockholmers. Myers’ work has been published in The Architect’s Newspaper, Log, The Funambulist Magazine, Failed Architecture, Avery Review, Dwell and l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. Her most recent exhibition, “A Pause Is Not A Break,“ was exhibited widely, including at the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Iowa and Carleton University.

RIOT (Research and Innovation on Territory) is a laboratory engaged in pedagogy and research within the Institute of Architecture (ENAC) at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology–EPFL, led by Charlotte Malterre-Barthes with Elif Erez, Flore Guichot, Jeremy Ratib, Summer Islam, Antoine Iweins, Kathy Kao, Nathalie Marj, Romain Dubetier-Grenier, Sylvie Clavel, and Saira Mohammed. Believing that the construction sector and design disciplines must pivot and wholeheartedly engage in the current social and climatic urgencies by rewiring themselves to face and repair the harm, RIOT utilizes tactics and strategies to decarbonize, decolonize, and depatriarchalize space production–by design.