GODOFREDO ENES PEREIRA

My work consists of a rhizomatic exploration of architecture’s role in land struggles and the composition of existential territories:

One of the ways by which I approach this question is by investigating how communities organise in resistance to extractivism, and how that affects their concepts of the collective in relation to land. This was the key problem that I contended with in my PhD The Underground Frontier: Collective Politics from Below, and in the Atacama Desert Project that was part of Forensis exhibition at the HKW in 2014. The book Ex-Humus that I’ve been working on since 2015 (and will hopefully one day finish...), will bring together my research on this, with a particular focus on forms of making collective with the earth. Steming from this node are multiple research shoots, so to speak, such as a research on the role of dreams and visitations in articulating relations to land. In the meantime, Ex-humus has been presented in the form of short-texts and performance-lectures, the first taking place at the 2019 Sharjah Architecture Bienalle.

My teaching work with the Lithium Triangle Research studio between 2017-22 further explored this investigation, by collaborating with Atacameño communities facing the destruction of their enviornments due to the expansion of lithium extraction. Part of that work was exhibited as The Ends of the World, within the Lithium exhibition at Het Nieuwe Instituut, and at the Compulsive Desires exhibition at Galeria Municipal do Porto, both curated by Marina Otero Verzier. At Compulsive Desires I’ve also shown the film Inverted Mountain on the foreseen socio-environmental impacts of lihitum extraction in Barroso. This was a collaborative project by the Territorial Research Group (GIT), created in 2022.

The GIT is an action-research agency that sits at the intersection of my role as researcher and environmental activist. For many years I have been active within the movements of resistance that formed against lithium mining in the Barroso region of Portugal. The demands of contesting this struggle in the public media, have led to a new stem of my research branching out to focus on the environmental impacts of the “green transition”. I am currently leading an AHRC funded project on Visualising Relations to Land across Portugal, Norway and Brazil, in collaboration with Traditional and Indigenous Peoples’s organisations representing communities impacted by the advances of the extractive frontier for the green transition. I’ve also investigated the impacts of the green transition as a Co-I to the research project Scales of Justice, where we utilise key legal disputes around lithium mining in Chile and in Australia, to identify concepts with which to differentiate, assess, co-measure and adjudicate between global and local impacts of the green energy transition; and as Associate Researcher in the project LIQUIT: Silenced Voices of Territories.

Currently, I am working on Take Back the Land, a book that I’m co-editing with Dubravka Sekulic, to come out in 2026, with Bloomsbury. This will be the first overview of architecture’s contribution to land-based struggles – from landback, to climate justice or anti-gentrification – and brings together a fantastic set of contemporary architects and militants. In my own contribution, I explore the other key question traversing my work in the past decade, the interrogation of what is environmental architecture. My hypothesis that architecture always pre-exists, in other words, that a moutain or a river are architectures in that they organise modes of coexistence. In fact, what we call architecture should be better understood as the practice of composing with the architecture that is always already there - the earth. I have explored this in several essays and book contributions, and mostly via the transdisciplinary MA Environmental Architecture that I have created and directed at the Royal College of Art since 2017.

For a long time, I’ve been investigating the architecture of collective equipment. I’ve started this research with the ADS7 studio that I taught with Platon Issaias and David Burns at the RCA, and further developed it via multiple initiatives such as a partnership with the Municipality of Barcelona, the Architecture and Social Movements research group at the RCA, the exhibition Object/Project for the 2016 Lisbon Trienalle, or the event Last Evenings on Earth, that I’ve organised with workers across Sharjah, for the 2019 Architecture Biennale. In my work collective equipment refers to any spatial or material feature that gives consistency to modes of coexistence. By consistency I mean not a static or normative force - a ground -, but a minimum stability required for confidence in the possibility of relation. Collective equipment can be a variety of things, from tables to clubs, to storage units, nail salons, alleyways, shops and social centres. In that, this is also an investigation into popular and collective approaches to architectural production, counteracting both the state’s control over collective equipment, as well as its disciplinary and academic histories.

Many of the key aspects of this investigation – in particular the role of programming and militant analysis - are nuanced in the book CERFI: Analysis Everywhere, that I’ve co-written with my partner Susana Calo (Minor Compositions, 2025). This is a long-durée investigation of a militant research group that between the sixties and seventies, brought together Freud and Marx in an exploration of programming against the state.

You can click here for lectures and podcasts that are available online.