Book Club. The Image in Question: Dismantling Architectural Fictions

Venue: In the shamiana meeting space

This Canopy Session is a conversation between the current exhibition in the museum and the exhibition The Image in Question: Dismantling Architectural Fictions, presented by the Chair of Architecture Heritage and Sustainability at ETH Zürich. It links architectural practice to forms of resistance, collective memory, and counter-archival work. Both exhibitions ask how archives can be unsettled: not as neutral repositories of the past, but as active sites where other histories, solidarities, and futures may be imagined.

Through the chair’s Book Club format, this session brings a pedagogical tool from the design studio into a public setting. Usually developed with students as a space for collective reading, discussion, and reflection, the Book Club invites participants to think about architecture in relation to postcolonial studies, feminist theory and environmental humanities. For this public session, the format centres on archives and the (im)materiality of knowledge production.

Rather than treating texts as material to be summarised, the Book Club approaches reading as a collective practice. Participants are invited to share their own references, reflect on what resonates, identify what remains unclear, and trace the questions or tensions that emerge. In relation to the exhibitions, the session asks how archives can become sites of refusal, resistance, and reimagining, opening a dialogue between architectural practice, critical theory, and public conversation.

The exhibition The Image in Question: Dismantling Architectural Fictions, presented by the Chair of Architecture Heritage and Sustainability at ETH Zürich led by Prof. Mariam Issoufou, showcases the chair’s research and pedagogy through three central methods: unarchiving, dismantling, and refusal. It investigates the role of archives and images in shaping how, and by whom, architectural knowledge is produced, preserved, and legitimised.

This book club session is co-organised by Curator Adriana Domínguez Velasco, ETH Scientific Assistants Alexander Cyrus Poulikakos, and Rami Msallam in collaboration with Curator Tasnim Baghdadi (Co-Director Museum – Programmes) and Curatorial Assistant Olga Popova (Trainee).

The evening will be accompanied by drinks and snacks.

The Canopy Sessions are a series of talks with actors from art, culture, science and activism in the Shamiana meeting space, an open textile structure in the exhibition Disobedience Archive (Canopy for Broken Time) – In Dialogue with Raqs Media Collective. Here, archives can be experienced as living spaces for storytelling, remembrance and the transmission of knowledge. In addition to talks and readings, the sessions also include practices from our everyday lives that show how deeply knowledge is stored in our bodies. Each session takes up the chapters of the exhibition and asks how shared vulnerability can lead to new forms of attention, relationship and solidarity.

• Language: English
• Barrier-free access
• No registration required
• Free of charge