We are pleased to invite you to the upcoming AESOP Lecture Series event, titled “Landscapes of Elsewhere: On Borders, Practices and Approaches”, taking place on 20 November 2025 at Spazio Craft, Politecnico di Milano, and accessible both in person and online.
Speakers:
Negar Sanaan Bensi – Assistant Professor Architecture Department, TU Delft, Borders & Territories group;
Tinatin Gurgenidze – Co-founder of Tbilisi Architecture Biennial;
Salome Katamadze – PhD Candidate, UPDP, DAStU, Politecnico di Milano.
Moderator:
Alice Buoli – Assistant Professor of Urban Design, DAStU, Politecnico di Milano.
Modalities: In-person/Online
Venue: Spazio Craft (Department of Architecture and Urban Studies - Politecnico di Milano) Campus Leonardo, Edificio 11B, Via Ampère 20, 20133 — Milano
Date: 20 November 2025
Please register for the event through our page:
Due to privacy and policy requirements, registration is mandatory for in-person attendance: https://forms.office.com/e/x0rJ54qgCU
To attend online on Zoom:
Meeting ID: 991 8758 8681
Passcode: 024050
Abstract: Borders are active, performative constellations that both shape places and are shaped by them. This lecture reclaims the border from a state-centred instrument and directs attention to the territory’s own agencies: material traces, ecological morphologies, and unbuilt violences that refract, attenuate, and reconfigure bordering practices. Moving beyond the human-only frame, we investigate how landscapes — deserts, mountains, and marginal ecologies — produce counter-effects that feed back into the production of frontiers, identities, and institutions. Through three situated inquiries (the North Caucasus frontier between Georgia and Russia; the Georgia–Armenia boundary; and the desert margins of Balochistan at the Iran–Pakistan–Afghanistan nexus) the lecture assembles a compact diorama of methods and design stances: what kinds of instruments, multiscalar readings, and speculative enactments reveal the latent politics of place? Can shared methodological vocabularies be distilled without erasing geopolitical specificity? The talk proposes a practice-oriented reframing of border studies — one attentive to the material milieu as co-author of borders and to design’s role in making those relationships visible. The session, in conclusion will invite for an open collective discussion.
Biography: Negar Sanaan Bensi (Assistant Professor Architecture Department, TU Delft, Borders & Territories group) researches architecture, territory, infrastructure and inhabitation across the Iranian Plateau and the Middle East. She holds a PhD from TU Delft and is a UKNA fellow. Her project On Thirst and Mirage maps the dried Hamoun wetlands (Iran–Afghanistan border), combining archival sources, fieldwork, photography and interviews to trace water, displacement and vernacular techniques in desert border landscapes.
Tinatin Gurgenidze (Co-founder of Tbilisi Architecture Biennial) studies post-socialist housing and territorial practices. Co-founder and artistic director of the Tbilisi Architecture Biennial, she curated the Georgian Pavilion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. Her project Common Territories organises field schools, workshops and exhibitions documenting shared everyday spaces and practices across border regions in the South Caucasus and beyond.
Alice Buoli (Assistant Professor of Urban Design, DAStU, Politecnico di Milano) works at the intersection of design and urban studies, focusing on urbanism in the Global South and border studies. Since 2012, she has held teaching positions at Politecnico di Milano (Italy) and is involved in editorial and curatorial projects, including contributions to Planum.
Salome Katamadze (PhD Candidate, UPDP, DAStU, Politecnico di Milano) investigates physical and cultural transformations of landscapes in conflictual border territories. A PhD candidate at Politecnico di Milano since 2022, she studies the evolving Georgian borderlands. She holds a Master’s in Architecture from the University of Ferrara (2020), was a Fondazione Benetton fellow (2020–21), co-founded NOIA (2020) and is a visiting PhD researcher at TU Delft (Border & Territories). We look forward to your participation
