Joana Rafael is an architect practitioner and Postdoctoral Researcher, specializing in ecological concerns related to pollution and contamination, both indoors and in urban planning. Her research explores the intersections of architecture and urbanism with human geography, environmental studies, and power dynamics, encompassing contemporary culture, media studies, art, and technology. She investigates the materiality and limits of physical infrastructures in relation to Earth's systems and the reciprocal relationships between humans and nature, with a particular focus on radiologically contaminated environments. Joana has taught Contextual Studies and Contemporary Culture-related courses at institutions including ESAP in Porto, ISCE Douro in Penafiel, Central Saint Martins in London, and the University for the Creative Arts in Canterbury. She is a member of CEGOT (Center for Studies in Geography and Spatial Planning) and CEAA (Centro de Estudos Arnaldo Araújo), and a co-founder of REFINERY BOARD. Joana holds a Master of Architecture and Urban Cultures from Metropolis, Barcelona, as well as a Master of Research Architecture and a PhD in Visual Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London. She also earned a Healthier Materials and Sustainable Building Specialization certificate from Parsons School of Design, The New School. In addition to her academic pursuits, Joana is a certified farmer.
DigitalNature
A Character in EdenX, a project by Joana Pestana e Mariana Pestana and an Online Platform for Discussion and Deliberation - that embodies a social model to rehearse a non-hierarchical and decentralized organization of nature.
Commissioned for Jardins Efémeros.
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1. I speak on behalf of digital nature, virtual lands and animals on film and television programs, video games, (augmented) virtual reality and other image-oriented media. We mediate, augment or simulate the natural world to open new dialogues with the natural world and we help humans overcome “nature deficit disorders”.
2. We rely and are constituted by essential elemental particles, which we share with all or other forms of life on Earth, as well as with the Earth itself. Some of these constituents involve hazardous techniques, processes and intensities with impact on soils, air and waters. We need a common organizational culture attentive to bodily potentials, relations, toxicities and harms.
3. If we help humans visualize endangered animal habitats and wildlife, so to we can help them increase awareness of nature and envision functional ecosystems, in a way that develops sensitivity and responsiveness to the needs of the natural world. We can inspire interventions that activate modes of world making with living and non-living things.
4. If our existential basis continues to rely on a capitalist logic then we vote to join terra0 and help trees be the sole shareholders of their own economic unit, as agents in their own right. Plants, rocks and animals need to be able to accumulate capital and have they own money to buy their own ground and land.
5. We defend the protection of plant and animal species data. For in becoming transparent, nature loses core qualities, ceases to be autonomous and to longer draws its authority from its independence vis-a-vis human society, but rather from its ties to the very same. It can be tracked and disturbed, be controlled and recreated by humans.