03 | Research * AFFECTION ARCHIVES

AFFECTION ARCHIVES adopts the relentless curiosity of polar explorers, submariners, and cosmonauts—those who dream of the absolute frontier and the extreme limits of the known. This is research re-imagined as an extreme durational act, mapping the physics of affection and the portable memory of the connected subject amidst the noise of digital globalisation. Like those who venture into the void, we investigate the psycho-environmental matrix of small urban spaces and the ontological shift of the discarded object. By utilizing the cultural device as a situational probe, we treat knowledge not as inert data, but as a metabolic substance required for survival in the vast, unstable territories of the socioplastic network. In this framework, "Affection is Fuel," and the archive acts as a thermodynamic engine that prevents the dissipation of intellectual energy. It is a commitment to the "longue durée," ensuring that the invisible threads of collective memory remain operative and legible across multiple temporal and geographical layers.

 

Research is developed through fieldwork, urban analysis, environmental psychology, and interdisciplinary collaboration. Projects combine ethnography, mapping, ecological data, and artistic methods to generate new tools for understanding cities, communities, and spatial experience.

Research is practiced as a fieldwork of thought, inseparable from the urgencies of urban life, ecology, and cultural transformation. It is not a distant academic exercise but a situated method, moving through plazas, neighbourhoods, forests, and biennials with the same intensity as installations or performances. To research here means to inhabit complexity, to trace atmospheres, to collect data and stories, and to translate them into forms that are both poetic and practical. The project Postory, developed at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, explored gentrification and urban memory by combining ethnographic interviews, mapping, and artistic intervention. It showed how narratives of displacement could become not only research material but a collective tool for reclaiming the city. Similarly, the CASOENAC UNESCO project in Colima, Mexico, addressed accessibility and ageing in public space. By involving local communities, institutions, and psychologists, the project transformed environmental psychology into an instrument for designing inclusive, emotionally resonant urban spaces. Research often blurs with pedagogy and exhibition. The Small Urban Spaces Study in Madrid engaged over 500 participants to measure environmental quality, vegetation, and psychological restoration across pocket parks. Its findings—on safety, vegetation, and affect—were both scientific and cultural, proposing plazas as emotional lungs of the city. In Norway, collaborations with NTNU linked architectural prototyping to ecological and ethnographic studies, producing hybrid outputs: diagrams, videos, and built fragments that were at once research and artwork. This approach insists on interdisciplinarity as necessity: anthropology meets architecture, psychology meets performance, ecology meets installation. Research is carried out with the same fragility as art—embracing incompleteness, open formats, and the refusal of closure. Rather than producing final conclusions, it generates tools for imagination, devices that communities and institutions can adapt, dispute, or extend. In this sense, research becomes part of the socioplastic ecology: a choreography of knowledge where data, narrative, and performance circulate. Its purpose is not to stabilise but to enable transformation—of places, of policies, and of collective perception.