Join 2024 CCA-WRI Fellows Emily Doucet, Gökçe Günel, and Yosuke Nakamoto on Tuesday 6 August as they share their research undertaken as part of Above/Below/Between: Light on a Damaged Planet. Jointly convened by the CCA and the Window Research Institute based in Tokyo, this three-year research fellowship program began in 2022. This summer, the three 2024 CCA-WRI fellows have been spending time at the CCA interrogating a third element in the diffusion of light across our solar societies: the condition of the “between.” The “between” names specific phenomena that become apparent between the atmosphere and land, and that reflect the Earth’s condition as a solar-dependent environment. These include, for example, increasing levels of air pollution across the globe, and how this has become a major concern for everyday human activities in towns and cities. The “between” also contains the chemical aftereffects of carbon combustion, industrial production, and forest fires. Air pollution thus becomes a phenomenon that generates a range of mitigation practices, from investments in public transit to green industrial technologies more broadly.

In the first half of the symposium, the fellows will speak about their individual research projects, which move across the extractive infrastructures supporting the development of photographic technologies to the generation of energy out of the environment.

Doucet will share her research into the development of Eastman Kodak’s global network of manufacturing and finishing facilities in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with a focus on how the architecture of Kodak facilities was adapted to local climates and regional architectures and infrastructures—including, and often most importantly, the negotiation of light and its absences.

By drawing on ethnographic work, Günel will surface how forms of offshore energy accumulation are growing in Ghana by questioning what constitutes non-linear energy infrastructures, and specifically the role that floating power plants, many Turkish-owned and run, play in West Africa.

Finally, Nakamoto will move through the material and energetic possibilities that salt offers across territorial, economic, and climatic thresholds. His broader research project navigates salt’s historical development, commodification, and mutual dependency with sunlight to reconsider our environment’s configuration in relation to alternative energy sources.

In the second half of the symposium, Doucet, Günel, and Nakamoto will be joined by CCA-WRI committee members Yoshiharu Tsukamoto (Co-Founder of Atelier Bow-Wow and Professor, Tokyo Institute of Technology), Daniel Barber (Chair of Architecture History and Theory, TU Eindhoven), and Masatake Shinohara (Associate Professor, Graduate School of Advanced Integrated Studies of Human Survivability, Kyoto University) who will respond to their research projects, as well as by Tadashi Ushimaru (Director, WRI), Marie Sasago (Program Officer, WRI), Akiko Tsukamoto (Senior Research Administrator, WRI), and Giovanna Borasi (Director, CCA).

Please register to attend online.

Emily Doucet is a writer, editor, and historian of photography and visual culture, based in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. After receiving a PhD in Art History from the University of Toronto in 2020, she held postdoctoral fellowships in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at McGill University, the Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities in Essen, Germany, and at The Image Centre at Toronto Metropolitan University. Her first book, Inventing Nadar: A History of Photographic Firsts, is forthcoming from Duke University Press in 2026.

Gökçe Günel is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Rice University. She is the author of Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (Duke University Press, 2019). Her work broadly investigates how cities transforms in the face of energy and climate change related challenges. Günel co-authored “A Manifesto for Patchwork Ethnography,” (2020) and co-leads the research project Patchwork Ethnography.

Yosuke Nakamoto is an architect and researcher based in Zürich. He is also a faculty member at the Department of Architecture in ETH Zürich. Raised between Bangkok, Tokyo, and London, he has studied at TU Wien, Accademia di architettura di Mendrisio and ETH Zürich. He has gained practice experience at Adolf Krischanitz in Vienna, EMI Architekten in Zürich and Staufer & Hasler Architekten in Frauenfeld. His research evolves around the cross-cultural exchange of ideas in a range of topics such as shifts of societal structures and their impact on the built environment, to forms of education and the implication of rural rituals in urban structures. His work has recently appeared in Cartha Magazine (2022), Oase #114 (2023), and trans #43 (2023).