Dear all,

 

Greetings,

Polis Architecture Institute is pleased to invite you to participate in our final roundtable of a talk series titled "Active Agents: Toward a Critical Archaeology of the Architecture Discipline." This initiative aims to facilitate a dialogue in the form of a roundtable discussion between architecture and other related disciplines. This talk series operates under the De-Discipline Program in collaboration with Waseda University (Keigo Kobayashi Lab) and Happy Hours (Institute of Science Tokyo) as a critical historiographical inquiry into the structural foundations of the architectural discipline.

 

We would like to extend the invitation to you to join our 4 ^th talk and roundtable discussion titled " Material-Semiotic Liquidation of Tokyo" by Michale Hornblow and Masamichi Tamura.

 

TALK INFORMATION:

PRESENTERS:

Michale Hornblow (NZ), (Artist-Researcher).

Masamichi Tamura (JP) (Researcher).

CHAIR: Abudjana Babiker.

DATE: November 5, 2025.

TIME: 18:00 ~ 20:00

LOCATION: Tokyo, Shinjuku, Nishiwaseda Campus, Building 55, First Floor, Innovation Lab.

FEES: Free. 

 

TITLE:

Material-Semiotic Liquidation of Tokyo

via the Conflux of Two Water Projects:

"Why is the River Laughing?" and "Following the Spectre of Water in a Seamful City"

 

DESCRIPTION: 

This session introduces two water-related projects conducted in Tokyo: "Why is the River Laughing?" by Michael Hornblow for the Tokyo Biennale 2023, and "Following the Specter in a Seamful City" by Masamichi Tamura for the CCA-Mellon Multidisciplinary Research Program "In the Hurricane, On the Land" (2024-2025). Using water as an ambiguously wild and gentle agency to liquidate the stable contours of familiar concepts, as well as disciplinary boundaries in urban studies, these two loosely complementary explorations employed untraditional methods to dive into hitherto obscure and under-represented depths of water in the city, including its absence, isolation, oppression, allegorization, gentrification, fortification, and the like. Hornblow explores the way hydro-mythologies call for a rewilding of the self, with urban waterways reflecting the changing course of cultural, political, and natural forces through the confluence of precarious planetary conditions. Tamura focuses on materialities in urban surface continuity, with ubiquitous technical objects as aggregating nearly invisible diffuse water into a latent risk redistribution system, while articulating its communal aspects for proposing watershed ethics. Exploring the semiotic relations and material formations of water in contemporary urban society, the session invites the audience to reframe our familiar imagination about water in the city and expand our sentience to the subtle entanglements and interruptions that integrate our life, habitat, and nature.

 

ABOUT THE PRESENTERS:

 

Michale Hornblow:

Michale Hornblow is an Artist-Researcher working across performance, video, art, design, and social practice. He completed his PhD in the Spatial Information Architecture Laboratory at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, followed by post-doctoral research in the SenseLab at Concordia University. Michael trained with dance choreographers Min Tanaka, Kazuo Ohno, Ko Murobushi, and others, and has led projects around the world, including for the Tokyo Biennale, Bangkok Design Week, Asiatopia, the International Symposium on Electronic Art, and Melbourne Festival. He is based in Thailand, where he was Artistic Director of Buffalo Field Festival, including the publication "Of Buffalo: Notes from the Field" (Hornblow, Yamtree, Castanas, Techniques journal, No.2, Bordering, p.1-27, 2022).

Michale Hornblow:

Masamichi Tamura is a Tokyo-based researcher with a strong interest in material-semiotics and elemental-politics of urban hybrid environments. Currently a doctoral candidate from Tokyo Institute of Technology, he runs his experimental community association "michikusakai" (lit. "allied flâneurs") while conducting field survey in an urban watershed as a Mellon researcher in the "In the Hurricane, On the Land" program initiated by Canadian Centre for Architecture. His recent publication includes "Not-Not as Another Spatial Logic of Constitutive Negation" (Footprint journal, Vol.35, Cosmotechnics, p.79-87, 2025) and "Water-with" in 100 Words for Water: A Projective Ecosocial Vocabulary (Lars Müller Publishers, 2025) as his contribution to Water Parliaments at the Catalonian pavilion for Biennale Architettura 2025.

 

 

HOST: ABUDJANA BABIKER.

Abudjana Babiker is an architect, researcher, author and curator based in Tokyo. He is currenlty a PhD candidate at Waseda University. He has actively participated in a number of architecture competitions, architecture/urban research, and transdisciplinary projects and contributed to a number of publications and conferences. He is a founding director of Mittetulundusühing Polis Architecture Institute (PAI), an institute dedicated to liberal art, architecture history and empowerment of architects. His major research interests and activities encompass architectural discourse, ontology of architectural elements & composition, the objects of the city, historiography, production and reproduction through architecture, architectural borders and territories, representation & aesthetics and architecture journalism. And his recent interest expands to the llimitations and problematics in architecture.

CONTACT:

Name: Abudjana Babiker.

Email: abudjana@akane.waseda.jp

 

We look forward to your participation.

 

Thank you.

With regards,

 

Abudjana H. E. Babiker

Arch. SIA | Ph.D. Candidate.
Department of Architecture 建築学科

School of Creative Science and Engineering  創造理工学部・研究科 
Waseda University 早稲田大学