Editorial

Decolonizing Spatial Epistemologies: Rethinking Space, Time, and Design Through Indigenous Knowledges

Abstract

Decolonizing Spatial Epistemologies gathers a fully Latin American dossier that advances a ch’ixi epistemology, coexistence without fusion, an interwoven yet non-assimilated fabric of worlds, in Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s sense (Rivera Cusicanqui, 2010). The issue takes aim at the long-standing denial of coevalness by which scholarly and heritage regimes have located Indigenous peoples in another time instead of the present (Fabian, 1983). Rather than accepting linear, progressive chronologies, the contributions treat time as layered, situated, and plural, attentive to ritual, narrative, and territorial anchoring (De la Cadena, 2010). This temporal reorientation proceeds together with a spatial one: design is approached from within territories and relations, not above them, resonating with the Critical Zone’s insistence on thick, earthbound interdependence and the refusal of abstract, placeless frames (Latour, 2018). In this sense, relational ontologies and ecologies of knowledge are not thematic additions but methodological grounds for architectural thinking that is pluriversal, more-than-human, and situated (Escobar, 2016; Haraway, 2016; Rahder, 2020; Coccia, 2019; Watson, 2019).