Post-Disaster Memoryscapes

Abstract

This essay enters the Covid-19 pandemic activated discourse in a sympoietic manner by drawing parallels to the architectural response to the 3.11 Disaster in Tohoku, Japan as a lens to reflect on architecture’s broader response-ability towards matters of human displacement, collective trauma, loss, and memory. It explores the notion of burn-out through the scope of disaster-stricken Japan and the road towards recovery by examining three cases of architectural and curatorial projects to illustrate architectural skills and media – drawing, model-making and fieldwork. All of them were characteristically deployed and instigated community transformation through conversational platforms and trust-building. These platforms are referred to as post-disaster memoryscapes, to illustrate the result of fusing community collaboration with architectural mediums in a distinct ethnographical mode capable of reconciling past, present and future. The paper argues that such ethnographical modes of operating expand architecture’s role from a limited sense of building (re)construction, towards the Harawayian notion of sympoietic caring.