Castello del Valentino Dialogues 2026 | Public Keynote Lecture by André Tavares, University of Porto

Salone d'Onore - Castello del Valentino - Viale Mattioli 39, Torino

The Castello del Valentino Dialogues is a platform that aims at creating a dynamic forum for crafting alternative ways of thinking, exploring and writing the urban. Bringing together PhD students and early career researchers with an interest in Architecture and Urbanism along with established scholars, writers and publishers, it invites a reflection that can challenge conventional modes of thinking and research. Participants will debate topical issues in the field of urban and architectural studies, try out new creative writing techniques and methodological tactics, and enhance their skills for presenting and publishing research.

After the first and successful edition “Tentacular Thinking! Tentacular Writing?”, inspired by relational thinkers, the 2nd edition of the Castello del Valentino Dialogues turns to the archives as places where architectural knowledge is constructed. The Castello Dialogue 2026 turns to the environmental turn recently experienced in architectural history scholarship and adjacent disciplines. As architectural history is being influenced by the questions and modes of the environmental humanities, architectural archives change and expand, challenging the very notion of human exceptionalism which is at the roots of the built environment.

The Castello Dialogue 2026 engages with the following questions: How to look at archives as dynamic objects, where human choices and more-than-human agents are, over time, layered, combined, disassembled, then rearranged together? How to listen to the plant, animal, and mineral voices preserved in human-made archives, explore their agency, and how do we speak on behalf of different entities through archival traces? How can we treat ecologies, cities, and landscapes as archives, with their own patterns of sedimented memories? How can archival knowledge be helpful when facing the crisis of narration and the unthinkable posed by the new climatic regime (Ghosh 2016)?

Public keynote lecture - Wednesday, Semptember 9th, 2026 - Salone d'Onore, Castello del Valentino (Viale Mattioli 39)
"Fisheye Methods" - André Tavares, University of Porto

It is a well-known fact that fish do not leave many archival traces. Humans, on the other hand, do: using a range of resources, from fishbones collected in middens and scattered archival materials to official statistics of fish landings, it is possible to address the history of marine ecosystems and fish populations. It is, however, a complicated process requiring the compilation of complex datasets, a detailed examination of their relations, the use of hindcast modelling to address past ecosystems, and the retracing of historical narratives to arrive at a comprehensive outline of how fish and architecture are entangled. The interdisciplinary work developed in the framework of the Fishing Architecture research project constructs a wealth of connections between fish, architecture, history, and marine biology. This presentation will delve into the project’s research practices to offer an overview of its methods and a glimpse of its results.

The speaker
André Tavares is an architect, researcher at Faculty of Architecture at the University of Porto where he is the principal investigator of the project Fishing Architecture funded through a European Research Council grant. Since 2006 has been founding director of Dafne Editora, an independent publishing house based in Porto. With Diogo Seixas Lopes he was editor-in-chief of the magazine Jornal Arquitectos (2013–15) and in 2016 chief cocurator of the 4^th Lisbon Architecture Triennale, The Form of Form. He was chief-curator for architecture exhibitions at Garagem Sul of Centro Cultural de Belém, in Lisbon (2017–23). He is the author of several books, including The Anatomy of the Architectural Book (Lars Müller/Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2016), Vitruvius Without Text (gta Verlag, 2022) and Architecture Follows Fish (MIT, 2024). His latest book, Fearless Forms, Fearful Concrete (Park, 2026), addresses concrete and the onset of Brazilian modern architecture.