To start navigating Metamorphic Zone, please rotate your device 90 degrees to navigate it horizontally.
We are seeking early-career thinkers and creators who are developing a critical and innovative practice that traverses disciplinary boundaries to join our network. Our current areas of interest include – but are not limited to – the following interconnected fields:
Ecology Geology Urbanism Infrastructure Geography Geopolitics Ethnography Cartography System Theory Cybernetics Sense-making Enactivism Cosmology etc.
For more information, please refer to the document available here:
Metamorphic Zone begins from the co-production among practitioners across diverse disciplines, taking words as shared departure points and thresholds through which practices meet, translate, and transform. From writing to editorial, words here are not vessels of meaning but mediators of relation, inviting new forms of dialogue across fields and sensibilities. Through collaborative writing, we encounter the multiplicity of worlds that words seek to hold together.
There are two ways of rendering our choices for the inquiry into existence, a state of bifurcation: one is the real but meaningless matter named nature – or the material; the other is the meaningful but unreal symbol named culture – or the mind. However, these two are in a relationship of shaping and being shaped by each other. To overcome the oppositional yet inseparable relationship of this bifurcation, one might recognise that the world is composed of hybrids of both the natural and the cultural. The world acts in multiplicity. Words are one of these agents, with semantic capacities that contribute to mediating our relationship to the world.
From the Nature of singularity to the World of multiplicity, we must learn to inhabit the metamorphic zone. Metamorphism is a fundamental attribute of the world itself; it can be understood as any entity, agency, or phenomenon undergoing transformation, whether human or non-human, material, or immaterial. Within this condition, different actors exchange features, leading to new distributions of agency.
Metamorphic Zone thus exists as a living field of correspondences, an ongoing co-production where practitioners, ideas, and worlds continuously encounter and reshape one another. From metaphor to metamorphism, words are actors that navigate us within the world where existence and signification are synonyms, embedded as properties of all agents.
This project has taken form through the effort, enthusiasm, and generosity of each contributor. In this shared process, discussing, learning, and working together have been invaluable.
The intention behind Metamorphic Zone emerged from an intuition to assemble a shared glossary – one that could articulate how we inhabit, think, and act together in the Anthropocene. The name draws on the legacy of Bruno Latour, whose work reminds us that metamorphosis is an epistemic condition: a simultaneous transformation of knowledge, perception, and the world we inhabit.
Responding to the challenge of bringing practitioners from varied disciplines into conversation, the project seeks to cultivate a network in which ideas evolve through encounter, knowledge is generated through dialogue, and collaboration becomes a shared response to shifting conditions.
We are grateful for the insights and guidance of Ann-Sofi Rönnskog and John Palmesino, whose teaching at the Architectural Association significantly informed the development of the project. Thanks to our friends Shuhang Clarice Cao, Sheer Gritzerstein, and Hiroaki Yamane for their inspired ideas and support.
Our initial contributors, including Kunlin He, Kristiina Koskentola, Lucia Rebolino, and Dr. Catherine Russell, have been generous in their engagement. We are especially grateful to web designers Pianpian He and Max Harvey, and to web developer Mianwei Wang, whose thoughtful work enabled the realisation of the digital platform.
The Anthropocene, as a debatable geological epoch, was first proposed by atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2000. Crutzen argued that the Earth System had undergone irreversible mutations, entering a state where the current epoch Holocene was no longer appropriate. The Anthropocene Working Group (AWG) later advanced this understanding, asserting that the Anthropocene emerged from mid-twentieth-century planetary transformations, a period closely linked to the onset of the Great Acceleration.
The AWG have been coordinating investigations aimed at confirming the Anthropocene as a formal geological time unit by examining key anthropogenic markers in the geological record. Although the proposal to formalize the Anthropocene as a geological epoch was rejected by the International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) in 2024, the identified markers indicate profound alterations to planetary cycles.
The Anthropocene is not an immoderate extension of anthropocentrism. Its root, Anthropo-, reflects not only the extent of human impact on the Earth but also suggests the anthropomorphism of the more-than-human entities, now infused with human-like characteristics. Unlike (meta-)morphism, which implies continuous transformation across various agents, (anthropo-)morphism points to a highly hybrid state where increasing human input becomes irreversibly embedded in both animate and inanimate entities. This epoch is also marked by the actions of these anthropomorphised, which may emote, react, or even seek retribution against those once identified as the Anthropos who no longer could be regarded as one unified agent.
Haoge Gan
2/2
As a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene is where the world-system(s) dominates and impacts the Earth System at unprecedented scales and intensities. This epoch invites critical inquiry in navigating the tensions across these systems, not only regarding humanity as a collective but also concerning individual actors. However, the term Anthropocene itself faces challenges, as it has been interpreted in distinct ways across the various disciplines it traverses. These divergent perspectives often lead to misunderstandings, highlighting a diminishing mutual comprehension within this inquiry. These differences must be rigorously examined and, when necessary, contested.
These controversies expose the lingering inertia from the Holocene, where nature has been viewed as a passive backdrop to human society. The Anthropocene underscores the urgent need for a comprehensive reorganization, particularly in how facts are constructed, how infrastructures are operated and how protocols are settled. Navigating in the Anthropocene demands not trying to “reconciliation” of nature and society into a larger system, but rather a circumvention of that division altogether. This circumvention prompts inquiries into the redistribution and relocation of agencies, the establishment of cosmopolitics, and the forging of bound that ground us to the Earth, where we have long subsisted and will continue to co-inhabit with.
Dualisms, such as mind-body, human- non-human and culture-nature, the ‘unbinding’ of the human life from nature and the human and from the non-human means positioning the human as the superior, the only one with a rational consciousness. Due to dualisms our ties to immanent life and our interrelationality have been undone. René Descartes (1596–1650), a seminal figure in the emergence of modern philosophy and science, and the father of the Cartesian dualism, claimed that the body cannot think. While performing vivisections, he claimed that animals were mere machinale, non-thinking, non-feeling, soulless lower beings. Cartesian dualism rendered the natural world and its beings mute, deaf, inanimate and insentient. Subordinate servants to man, who claimed to be only one capable of communication and making meaning. Human exceptionalism, the idea of human intellect as something superior to that of all our co-beings, has led to the incapability to recognize and to respect their different qualities.
Cartesian dualism spread over the world like a wild fire became the fundamental worldview. It has driven and allowed for colonialisms, tremendous extractivisms, concentration camps for other animal species to maximize their potential for consumption, climate decline, and destruction biodiversity alongside with cultural and spiritual practices and belief systems.
Writer Amitav Ghosh points out the Cartesian dualism as the root of the transition from animistic worldviews to humancentric. Utilizing and focusing on this modernist societies (and sciences) became patriarchal, racialised and reductionist- generating exploitative forms of knowledge that were needed for industrialization – and keep fuelling capitalisms. That have become the only “true knowledge” – as opposed to knowledges fostering pluriverse, regeneration, and cultivation that could be considered as vital knowledges, and continuums.
The modernist human has institutionalized gods and situated them outside the natural world.
In my research to oppose dualisms I have been working with Northern shamanisms for a long time. I have had the privilege to meet and work with many shamans in particular in Manchuria (Northeast China) and Southern Mongolia (Inner Mongolian Autonomic Reagion, China). Shamanic cosmologies urge for respectful treatment of the living, animistic and interdependent world that is mystical, complex and delicately resilient. In shamanisms, and in indigenous ontologies in general, there is no single external “reality” or temporality. In this sense “reality” is a process or relationship or multiple relationships rather than an object. For a shaman, rituals are polyvocal, and are generative, deeply rooted points of knowledge production, affirming cosmic and worldly alliances and solidarity with interdependent worlds. Ancestors, spirits, animal gods and all phenomena, all entities and beings are active and vital subjectivities and knowledge – generating agencies. Across temporalities and spaces.
‘White Birch’, Hulunbuir, 2023. Taken by Kristiina Koskentola.
“There are magical phenomena, but they are all part of this world”.
—With shaman Selehada, Manchuria, 2023
For the modernist we enter here the terrain of extra-natural and unscientific. However I would rather see this as going beyond this limited understanding of science and its politics, to the terrain of the not-yet known, terrain of re-enfleshing of untangling the body from the violence of dualism (such as in modern science).
After all everything in the universe is energy. Nothing can exist without another.
Dualistic thinking enableb us human to create this mess, the period of human dominance and attendant extinction and environmental devastation known as the Anthropocene, that is the consequence of the “amputations” of the sensitivities and intellects of our co-beings and environments. We need regain our engagement, take responsabilty and humbly acknowledge that we are molecular, we are immanent, we are interdependent, we are intra-acting agencies, and not more (or less) than one being amongst other (beings): physically, emotionally, materially and ethically tangled with and embedded in Earth. We humans ourselves are, and are part of multispecies community. This necessitates rejection, or rather excorsims, of dualisms. As oppesed to dualities, continuums celebrate vital materialism and the self-organising forces of matter. Subjectivity of all being and entities. Multiple forms and agencies of knowledge vibrate and course through bodies and beings, organic, inorganic, thoughts, actions and imaginations, making the worlds.
“Within the porous landscape a shaman worships his holy mountain. May dried out rivers and waterfalls and the damaged land resurrect, come to life”.
—Excerpt from the film installation Flesh and Metal. Light and Oil. Kristiina Koskentola (2020): Reflecting the ceremony by böö (shaman) Altanduulag, Abaga Banner, Southern Mongolia (Inner Mongolian Autonomic Reagion, China).
