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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
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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.
Sampling from highland to lowland Myanmar. Detection of intended burnt area for rare earth mining during period of 2010-2022.
One of the largest areas outside the reach of State power, Zomia, the mountainous region of mainland Southeast Asia, home to more than a hundred ethnicities. It is today warped by the rapid extension and intensification of the technosphere, which transforms it from a peripheral to a significant geopolitical space. The new planetary paradigm narrows down and isolates rare earth minerals: they are identified as critical raw materials, essential for a multiplicity of advanced technological developments, ranging from medicine to metallurgy and the energy transition, passing through realms as diverse as refrigeration and liquid crystals displays. With the rise of the technosphere, Zomia is transformed into a geopolitical space: conflicts never end. As a semi-autonomous territory run by brutal military regimes, industries are illegal and hardly exist on paper. Rare Earth amplifies the connections between material and meaning. Rare earth, as multiplications, is the Gaia device.
Rare Earth, formed in Supernovae, is deeply intertwined with the processes that led to the formation of the earth and its subsequent geological evolution. Our history is periodised after the materials used for tools and weapons: the Stone Age (Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic), the Metal Age (Bronze Age and Iron Age), and the Industrial Revolutions led us into the Atomic Age and Information Age. We are now in the Anthropocene, a rare earth age that bears the energy transition. After coal, oil, and gas, rare earth became the most valuable raw material, the key to humankind’s clean energy future. With these technological adaptations, human society has become more productive and detached from the past.
Rare earth is a substitute in technological development. The rising technosphere makes the biosphere more visible, informational and accessible. From the French Mekong Exploration Commission 1866, southeast Asia massif has been measured, mapped, and visualised. Highland Myanmar becomes a map, a research, a resource, data, a deal, a substitute for Zomia, bearing exchanges. Rare earth substitutes for the mountains’ exchanges: jade mining, logging, booming cities with illicit industries, hydropower stations, and opium cultivation. It is the exchange of material, energy, capital, and powers.
Rare earth is a transformation. It is mined by in-situ leaching: Vegetation is removed, and chemicals percolate through, acids, heavy metals, and radioactive elements leak into the soil, ravaging the highlands into a completely toxic land. According to the QGIS detection, by the end of 2023, more than 2,700 leaching pools were found in the Kachin State near the Myanmar-China border. Within a few years, especially since Coup 2021, rare earth mining has exploded so quickly that this mountainous corner of Myanmar has become one of the world's largest supply sources.
Rare earth makes the Highland a deal for China in the global supply chain, an intermediate in the trade, the matter flux. Under China’s ecological civilisation, Myanmar is part of its Belt and Road Initiative, which plans mega-infrastructural projects as part of a China-Myanmar Economic Corridor. China invests in the extraction and gains materials from the mountains. Rare earth intermediates the highland into the global processing architecture, a planetary economy. Under the ground, rare earth is the mining operation in the world; in the earth’s crust, it is a strata. Since Ytterbium was discovered in Sweden in the 18th century, 17 rare earth elements have been found. They are abundant and well-distributed in the crust but typically dispersed and rarely found in concentrations. Therefore, transforming mineral components into chips is complex and highly polluting: one-tone production of rare earth oxides produces wastes, including dust, gas, water, and radioactive residue, nearly ten times the production weight of rare earth oxides. In Highland Myanmar, rare earth is a debris and solution, fuelling this remote, lawless mountainous area; however, it is the tabula rasa for chasing our contemporary dream. Developing clean energy technology has become increasingly crucial: we rush to meet climate goals. According to the IEA, the demand for rare earth elements is expected to reach three to seven times current levels by 2040. Rare earth is a critical material, geopolitical war, and the media for maintaining dreams. It is a haunting structure of power, still on the way to finding the dreamland. In the dreamland, the mountains and people are both the operator and recipient. There is a dream of accessibility, a dream of conquer, a dream of independence and eluding power; a dreamland named Golden Triangle, the world’s largest opium-producing area since the 19th century, under British rule with the international opium trade. The land is the hub, constantly producing tablets and maintaining human dreams.
Rare Earth, Gaia Device. Oscillating the links between science and technology, politics and mining, identity and ecologies, elusions and stability, duration and power, lowlands and hills, energy and dreams.
