This year in Diploma 19, we will deepen our anthropological and architectural explorations of emergent, syncretic types of practice and architecture. Syncretism can be understood as a method for nesting, blending, juxtaposing or hybridising radically divergent and often incommensurable architectures of ‘reality’. We will think with examples of schismogenesis – experiments in radical cultural divergence – and other ways of seeing, relating, knowing and building that operate from within and against dominant ‘typologies’ of infrastructure, architecture, law, property and ecology.

In Ireland, abstract water governance serves monopolistic agriculture, big data and AI, precipitating water contamination and scarcity in one of Europe’s wettest islands. Group water schemes are bypassing dominant infrastructure and property regimes to reclaim wells, dams and treatment systems as not only technical, but cultural, ecological, cosmological and political spaces. Sites like bogs and peatlands, once typologised as ‘Nature’, become hybrid terrains beyond categorisation.

Amid the acceleration of sinkholes caused by overuse of water for industrial farming, Turkey’s dams, canals, farms, markets, mosques and homes are becoming platforms for experimental practices which hybridise pre-monotheistic ‘sympathetic magic’, Islamic practices, and technological and scientific knowledge to assist water’s descent from clouds to rivers and aquifers.

Indigenous communities in Siberia are codesigning dances with melting permafrost, ancestors, lakes, frozen rivers and ancient mammoth bones that operate from within and against Soviet and Russian urban parade typologies and their necropolitics that poison the land and its people.

Operating against architecture’s complicity in colonial domination, we will ask how we might instead ‘take the side’ of those who are already experimenting with new architectures of relation. We argue that any form of ‘building’ common realities must involve the democratic representation and participation of all beings – more-than-human, living, dead, unborn and invisible – whose flourishing is impossible to disentangle from our own.