In that sense, I want to emphasise how the politics of citation are clearly related with Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ concept ‘las ecologías de los saberes,’ where inclusion of diverse knowledges and the ways in which we refer to them are also a matter of care. The title of this text and some of my ramblings about the topic come from a diverse set of references, from books and research projects to dreams and conversations with friends.

In other words, we need to constantly contest and question how we share knowledge to imagine other possible worlds and which are the sources of those imaginations, because as my dear friend Francisco Díaz once said,[1] the blank page is always full of previous inscriptions.

*

If we consider the relationship between the act of referencing, the politics of citation, and footnotes as a form of care and affection, it would be possible to understand these practices not only as recognition and respect for those —architects, writers, poets, critical thinkers— from whom one learns, but also as a form of collective care in relation to how knowledge is created and distributed. In her book Living a Feminist Life,[2] feminist writer and researcher Sara Ahmed points “Citation is how we acknowledge our debt to those who came before; those who helped us find our way when the way was obscured because we deviated from the paths we were told to follow. In this book, I cite feminists of color who have contributed to the project of naming and dismantling the institutions of patriarchal whiteness” Laurent Berlant and Kathleen Stuart affirms that “the performance called format can hold the things we think with: encounters, a word, a world, a wrinkle in the neighborhood of what happened. Even if some cites look like direct sources, all things are indirect sources, in truth.”[3]

Similar ideas were mentioned decades earlier by Ivan Illich on his book Deschooling Society,[4] where he stated “the current search for new educational funnels must be reversed into the search for their institutional inverse: educational webs which heighten the opportunity for each one to transform each moment of his living into one of learning, sharing, and caring.” And bell hooks follows up this line of thinking by saying that “learning must be understood as an experience that enriches life in its entirety.”[5] But we are now witnessing what can be described as ‘the academization of care,’ and with that, new models of exploitation and competitiveness emerge from the commodification and loss of meaning of this concept, as most necessary concepts with potential often start to fall from overuse. Mika Hannula beautifully relates to this with his words “The double act of digging deeper into the nuances of how to give content to a concept (or image, sign, act, symbol, etc.) and the aim of creating productive clashes of situated interactions is not so much about producing more talk as about generating sites and situations for learning again how to listen—and to listen carefully.”[6]

Then the big challenge ahead is how to demand openness and generosity and acknowledge that no learning can happen without a practice of care to sustain it.

To understand education as a matter of care, is relevant to question who controls the networks of production and distribution of knowledge, and how they do it, recalling what Dubravka Sekulić pointed out when she wrote “the people building alternative networks of distribution [of knowledge] also build networks of support and solidarity.”[7]

Even though there are many attempts to further advance in the field of the conventional citational structures, in academic circles the tendency of disciplines to be self referential is still common, and consequently it affects the way we research, select, and disseminate knowledge. In the past decades we have witnessed a growing monopoly of academic journals with an economic system based on the privatization and commodification of knowledge via paywalls and expensive subscription fees, which provokes what Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi describes[8] as “the subjugation of research to the narrow interest of profit and economic competition.” Professor Kecia Ali suggests “I want [my colleagues] to look at their research bibliographies and note who is missing from the list and why. And because citation is only one element in a scholarly ecosystem, I want them to look at who they invite to present in speaker series and on panels and who they ask to contribute to journal special issues and edited volumes and festschrifts. I want us to read differently and write differently.”[9] When we decide to mention certain bodies of work, we’re giving visibility to some ideas, while at the same time, we are excluding other voices, therefore some of the most important questions to ask ourselves are: who appears and who doesn’t? and, why?

“Competition is stupid in the age of the general intellect,” argues Berardi[10] and I must add that the way we reference the work of others is not innocent. The act of acknowledging is an act of responsibility and it can be a useful tool for the reactivation of the social body through the creation of solidarity networks based on knowledge exchange that can have a transformative potential.

“Ideas run, like rivers,” explains Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “from the south to the north and are transformed into tributaries in major waves of thought. But just as in the global market for material goods, ideas leave the country converted into raw material, which become regurgitated and jumbled in the final product. Thus, a canon is formed for a new field of social scientific discourse, postcolonial thinking. This canon makes certain themes and sources visible but leaves others in the shadows.”[11] Following Rivera Cusicanqui’s words I think of the many ways we, from academia and research practices, intend to build walls to contain those rivers, but it seems to be an impossible task no matter how hard we try.

In the Open Source community, whose work focuses on creating and amplifying the network effect, where collaborative use actually enriches resources and the organizations that adopt them, the words ‘built upon’ are used as the way to acknowledge and reference the previous projects in which a new project is based on and develops from. Learning from these platforms, I can’t help to think that in the architecture practice, where the word ‘built’ has an even deeper meaning, it would make sense to use this metaphor to acknowledge on which intellectual and practical research every new project is built upon.

Martin Shaw blatantly states that “navigating mystery humbles us, reminds us with every step that we don’t know everything, are not, in fact, the masters of all.”[12] Therefore, accepting that we don’t know many things is accepting that we need to open up our minds to other ways of learning, debemos abrir nuestras mentes a otras formas de conocimiento. “Conocimiento,” escribe Gloria Anzaldúa, “es otro modo de conectar across colours and other differences to allies also trying to negotiate racial contradictions, survive the stresses and traumas of daily life, and develop a spiritual-imaginal-political vision together. Conocimiento shares a sense of affinity with all things and advocates mobilizing, organizing, sharing information, knowledge, insights, and resources with other groups.”[13]

 In this sense and understanding the word ‘knowledge’—’conocimiento’—in all its breadth, it is time to ask ourselves about the places we inhabit, about architecture: What do we understand by city? Is it a planetary, postcolonial, queer, self-sufficient, or intelligent space? Does it happen in the center or on the periphery? Is it a city of affects and care? Is it all of the above? These questions become even more necessary at the present time when liberties are repressed, interpersonal and interspecies relationships questioned, and the idea of “surviving” supersedes that of “living”. It is in times such as these when we need tools that help us question how we live and why we accept living like this, and therefore ask ourselves how we would like to live. And language is one of those tools. Going back to Rivera Cusicanqui, “the possibility of a profound cultural reform in our society depends on the decolonization of our gestures and acts and the language with which we name the world.”

Following those ideas, we can say that our cities and its architectures are also full of narratives, and they are being told in as many diverse ways as we can possibly imagine. The bees, the trees, the clouds above and the pipelines below, the window of this building or the door of this other, the flag hanging from that balcony, the smoke of that chimney, the broken glass of another window, even the garbage truck—all of them have their own stories to tell and inform us about the spaces we inhabit. The disobedient kid opposing the police, or the young band playing outdoors in an abandoned plot telling one story with its lyrics but also just by being there, questioning why that plot is empty. The old woman at the market who tells the greengrocer funny and lovely stories about her grandson is the same lady standing in front of the red and juicy strawberries that have embedded the record of thousands of African migrants and the unfair labour conditions that prevail in the fields of Andalusia.

Languages, all of them, from different geographies, in different accents, but also the languages of the rivers, of the botanical world, of the electric sounds that surround us, are the tools in which we imagine, and more important, in which we share our imaginations, our knowledge, our worlds. “Designed to communicate with other species, the flowers traffic metaphors and seeds through their amazing visual, tactile and olfatory devices,” reminds us Patricia Portela.[14] For us, humans, languages are the tools to articulate ideas, to imagining otherwise and open our minds to a constellation of meanings, therefore, to a constellation of possibilities. But languages are not only verbal, as we have seen. Para Rivera Cusicanqui, fabrics and the action of weaving are means of knowledge exchange. “La mujer tejedora” es una gran metáfora de interculturalidad. Las mujeres siempre tejen relaciones con el otro, con lo otro. Con lo salvaje, con lo silvestre, con el mercado, con el mundo dominante. “I feel that there is a capacity for women to develop intercultural relationships through weaving. It is also a recognition that the body has its ways of knowing.”— aquí, en el colectivo, decimos que “la mano sabe.”[15]

The beauty of languages also relies in the fact that they don’t follow any linear time; you can not expect that a new vocabulary will supplant a previous one, as Jacob Eli Goldman wrote, “instead, what always happens, is that under the cover of nominal continuity, words acquire new meanings without losing their old ones.”[16] The city at night tells one tale very different to the tale it tells along the day even though we can use the same words in our attempts to describe both temporalities and the stories they hold.

Lola Olufemi wrote[17] that “the structural limits of this world restrict our ability to articulate all that imagination is capable of conceiving.” In that sense, storytelling is one of the most beautiful and compelling ways of sharing knowledge and caring for one another. Donna Haraway beautifully explained this when she wrote[18] “It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what descriptions describe descriptions, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.”

Memories contain stories, contain knowledge, create community. Sharing memories can be a matter of care, therefore how we share them matters. We don’t know where some stories begging neither where most of them end. What we know is that they often emerge small, like a little scream from the very inside and from unexpected sources.

I close my eyes and remember vividly the voice of my mother singing a lullaby and the comfort it brought. It’s a lullaby from South America called ‘Duerme Negrito’[19] which tells the story of a mother who leaves her child in the care of a neighbour while she goes out to work hard in the fields for no pay; so the caregiver promises that the child’s mother will bring him treats, such as quails and pork, if he falls asleep. It is a lullaby that speaks about love and care, but also about colonization, capitalism, labour, and patriarchy; and it is the same lullaby that I sang to my daughters when they were little kids. Recently I had a delicate surgery that kept me in bed for a few weeks. When I had trouble falling asleep, my daughters would sing me this same lullaby to calm me down and help me sleep. We can see that they have learned that lullabies are expressions of care not by being told so, just by the experience of their own memories.

All the reference and citations we share in our academic papers or in our architectural projects, and all the stories that we share through our voices, our gestures, in the way we look for one another; all the tales and fabulations that we learn from our wanderings by the river or in the mountains and the ways in which we share those stories, help us—all of us, the community— to notice the world differently, and “noticing the world differently can have material consequences that could be the difference between taking care and perpetuating paradigms of oppression and needless suffering,” wrote the Nigerian author Bayo Akomolafe.[20]

Because of all of that, I want to finish this text asking you to remember. Remember who you want to quote but also remember the sweet lullaby from your early years. Remember that the word ‘care’ can have infinite kaleidoscopic meanings that can be expressed in endless ways.

Borrowing from Joy Harjo,[21]

So my final question here should be: