Workshop organised by Maryia Rusak/Ijlal Muzaffar,
Baden-Baden, Germany, 11-14 December, 2025.
Baden-Baden, Germany, 11-14 December, 2025.
The workshop is the second in the series of academic conversations that originated from the First Lahore Design Summit, held in March 2024. Lahore was the site of one of the most traumatic displacements and migrations during the partition of the subcontinent, situated just a few kilometres from one of the most militarised borders in the world. This location led us to many discussions on the elusive nature and quality of land, which, despite its undeniable materiality, is constructed through illusions, dreams, and deep-seated traumas. And while the first workshop in Lahore, with the theme of ‘Simultaneity,’ focused on aspects of time and temporality—how land is produced by the simultaneous imaginations and overlapping projections of the past and the future, the second workshop set out to explore the more tangible foundation—the land. By bringing together architectural, historical, and design perspectives, the second workshop titled ‘Land(t)räume’ sought to interrogate how land operates simultaneously as material ground and as a site of projection, memory, and belonging.
The workshop then set out to explore the materiality of land and the dreams of land across disciplines and academic domains. What tools and methods can be applied to write, design, film, and photograph to expand the intellectual and the lived space between dream and trauma, between the factual and the fictional, the designed and the speculative, the historical and the mythical? This theme seems particularly relevant today, given the context of increasing geopolitical instability, land disappearing due to climate change, and new, intense political imaginaries re-invented and re-attached to land items (islands?) across the world. Across three days of the workshop, we have shared our research, which explores themes of land, borders, and political imaginaries across scales, perspectives, and disciplinary standpoints—from the smallest particles of dust, grain, and salt, and plants and animals surpassing borders, to the transnational identities created by new rail lines and grand narratives of absence, belonging, and resistance.
Beyond the thematic academic research, the workshop also explored new methods of cooperation, communication and translation. The participants shared their research and thinking not only within the confines of a classical conference room, but also through many shared meals, philosophical walks and hikes in the scenic natural and historical surroundings of Baden-Baden. Through many conversations, we explored and produced new reflections, seeking connections between and across the disciplines and mapping points of convergence that might not be immediately obvious. The workshop’s methodological goal was then to challenge the centralising pulls of our discipline and explore a different way of thinking and working together.
As a result, we are currently preparing the e-flux editorial and a larger publication, showcasing the research of the workshop’s participants, while the written, designed, filmed, and photographed interdisciplinary reflections will be further developed into an exhibition project.