FRAUD proposes a performative talk around their project EURO⁠—VISION; an inquiry into the extractive gaze of European institutions and policies. Initiated in 2018 in collaboration with Btihaj Ajana as an investigation into the collusion between border securitisation and resource management, the project examines the many entangled modes of extraction that Europe enacts on "third countries" with its Critical Raw Materials Initiative. This initiative brings into focus the covalence among international relations, trade, economic policy and border security, and forces us to understand extraction beyond the removal and displacement of minerals – to encompass policies, international treaties and regulations that impose controversial forms of stewardship of natural resources on communities. FRAUD will introduce some of the strands of research which have stemmed from resource categories such as phosphate, fish(eries), sand and carbon. Challenging how architecture modulates what is now considered a critical material with such categories helps to elucidate how these are managed as resources to be extracted, as well as how their plunder is mobilised and institutionalised. More importantly, this framework aims to enable looking beyond these practices to the possibility of thinking and doing otherwise.

Architecture has a modernist tradition of world-building visions that seeks to imagine the future of the planet through world-scale projects. Naturally being dependent on building materials, architectural practice is deeply entangled with industries that live from the extraction and exploitation of natural resources themselves entwined and framed by capitalist urbanization processes. “Progress felt great.... The problem is that progress stopped making sense,” writes the anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. Without the belief in progress, we can no longer project into a future with straightforward trajectories. In the era of the Anthropocene, the grand narratives of ceaseless progress and growth are being replaced by marginal yet multiple narratives still to be told. Subsequently, the relationship between the built and natural environment and the role of architectural practice have to be questioned.
Borrowing the term “Patchy Anthropocene” from Feral Atlas, this paper seeks to develop a concept for patchy architecture. The paper argues that the debate over the Anthropocene is able to push the field of architecture in new directions—an opportunity that should be fully embraced. Patchy architecture is about identifying uneven conditions without distinction within increasingly contaminated landscapes that have been modified by industries.
Architecture as a discipline is well equipped to analyze damaged landscapes and their structures, if it permits transdisciplinary approaches to be involved in the process. The paper looks at projects such as Devenir Universidad (Becoming University), an indigenous university in Columbia’s rainforest initiated by the artist Ursula Biemann, and the Floating University established by raumlabor, as potential alternatives in architectural building processes.