From the Mouth of a Salmon:
Architecture of Interspecies Storytelling
JIA CHEN MI
Jia is currently completing the last year of his Master of Architecture. Avid consumer of fake news and salads, he spends his time spinning yarn under the guise of ‘fictocriticism’.
Read the article in PDF form here.
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Figure 1. The Induction of René Digital, 2024. Jia Chen Mi.
How can place-based architecture research be conducted without presenting land and bodies of water as readily available receptacles for design?
This question was a starting point of a collaborative research project my colleagues Hannah Thiessen, Marie-Ellen Houde-Hostland, and I conducted at the Canadian Center for Architecture over the summer of 2023. The project, ‘River as Invitation,’ experimented with gathering knowledge about the Mitis River in Eastern Quebec by becoming part of the network of relations that the river ecosystem engendered. This network connects Indigenous and settler communities and several biological and mineral beings. By being there, research became the gathering of stories. Some were lived through our senses, and others were found in anecdotes from conversations. We believe that the immense collection of stories paints a picture of the web of interconnected human and non-human beings and their struggles.
The project ‘From the Mouth of a Salmon’ builds upon this past research and asserts that architecture can do more than collect narratives. In the book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway writes that it “matters what stories make worlds, and what worlds make stories.”[1] Any place is reflected by and the outcome of the stories told in and around that place. In the case of the Mitis River, it is a place of increasing ecosystemic pressure. The continued presence of dams, rising water temperature, and accelerating shoreline erosion result in the disappearance of places of refuge for animals and plants.
To truly listen to their stories is to take action in response to the growing threats to their survival. If stories created the world as it is, stories must be where the making of alternative worlds begins.
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Figure 2. River Fellowship Card, Digital, 2024. Jia Chen Mi.
To make worlds in which human and non-human beings nurture mutual survival, every actor needs to play a part in storytelling. In his treatise Ways of Worldmaking, philosopher Nelson Goodman writes: “Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking.”[2] For Goodman, this remaking often involves transforming existing stories. One can change the weighting of the narrative elements, deform them, reorder them, and delete some to supplement with others. Haraway calls this process speculative fabulation.[3]
Even with conscious effort, no two retellings of a story are identical. Some elements are imbued with a strong feeling of permanence. Central to every version of the tale, they feel solid and undeniable. Servant to the whims of memory, other elements come and go like a misty veil. A story is at once sharp and blurry. As one begins crafting new stories from existing ones, it is natural to wonder how to capture the simultaneous clarity and blurriness. Part of an answer came from studying a collection of archival photographs about the Mitis River from the 1940s. Black and white, grainy, and often obscured by marks of light damage, the pictures told dreamy stories. They feature nameless people gathering in undisclosed locations along the Mitis River.
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Figure 3. the Angler’s Body, Technical Pen on Paper. 14 in. x 17 in, 2023. Jia Chen Mi.
Figure 4. Refuges near Eroding Shorelines, Technical Pen on Paper. 14 in. x 17 in., 2023. Jia Chen Mi.
Who are they, what are they doing there? Looking at these pictures, our minds can’t help but fill in the story’s details, which have faded with time. This experience recalls reading books written by W.G Sebald. A photographer and collector, Sebald punctuates his novels with mysterious black and white photographs, which leave readers uncertain if the images illustrate moments in the story or if the story was written by imagining the details surrounding them. As I began to build alternative stories from archival materials, I also started letting these stories create archival materials from the imagined past. Using a combination of digital tools such as prompting and collaging, a fabulated archive is created, making visible a world of increased interspecies connection.
Concurrently, interspecies storytelling and worldmaking are also explored through my drawing practice. In pre-digital architecture practice, pen and ink renders connected the existing reality with imagined ones. Ink dots, placed at varying densities, seamlessly blur the lines between the present and future by mimicking the grain of photography. Just like historical photographs, pen drawings’ ability to be at once sharp and blurry enables them to be a powerful tool for storytelling. If the digitally doctored archive allowed storytelling across time, historical ink rendering techniques helped me to depict complicated relations between beings across different scales and levels of definition.
The growing catalog of photographs and drawings tells the stories of a world very near the one we are experiencing. As this alternative place where humans and non-humans are bound in kinship becomes fleshed out, its architecture slowly awakens. When it does, it will start to materialize the new world within our existing one while facilitating the telling of more stories from animals, plants, fungi, and rocks to continuously fill narrative gaps.
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Figure 5. Drowning 3, Technical Pen on Paper. 14 in. x 17 in., 2023. Jia Chen Mi.
Jia is currently completing the last year of his Master of Architecture. Avid consumer of fake news and salads, he spends his time spinning yarn under the guise of ‘fictocriticism’.
Read the article in PDF form here.
Figure 1. The Induction of René Digital, 2024. Jia Chen Mi.
How can place-based architecture research be conducted without presenting land and bodies of water as readily available receptacles for design?
This question was a starting point of a collaborative research project my colleagues Hannah Thiessen, Marie-Ellen Houde-Hostland, and I conducted at the Canadian Center for Architecture over the summer of 2023. The project, ‘River as Invitation,’ experimented with gathering knowledge about the Mitis River in Eastern Quebec by becoming part of the network of relations that the river ecosystem engendered. This network connects Indigenous and settler communities and several biological and mineral beings. By being there, research became the gathering of stories. Some were lived through our senses, and others were found in anecdotes from conversations. We believe that the immense collection of stories paints a picture of the web of interconnected human and non-human beings and their struggles.
The project ‘From the Mouth of a Salmon’ builds upon this past research and asserts that architecture can do more than collect narratives. In the book Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Donna Haraway writes that it “matters what stories make worlds, and what worlds make stories.”[1] Any place is reflected by and the outcome of the stories told in and around that place. In the case of the Mitis River, it is a place of increasing ecosystemic pressure. The continued presence of dams, rising water temperature, and accelerating shoreline erosion result in the disappearance of places of refuge for animals and plants.
To truly listen to their stories is to take action in response to the growing threats to their survival. If stories created the world as it is, stories must be where the making of alternative worlds begins.
Figure 2. River Fellowship Card, Digital, 2024. Jia Chen Mi.
To make worlds in which human and non-human beings nurture mutual survival, every actor needs to play a part in storytelling. In his treatise Ways of Worldmaking, philosopher Nelson Goodman writes: “Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking.”[2] For Goodman, this remaking often involves transforming existing stories. One can change the weighting of the narrative elements, deform them, reorder them, and delete some to supplement with others. Haraway calls this process speculative fabulation.[3]
Even with conscious effort, no two retellings of a story are identical. Some elements are imbued with a strong feeling of permanence. Central to every version of the tale, they feel solid and undeniable. Servant to the whims of memory, other elements come and go like a misty veil. A story is at once sharp and blurry. As one begins crafting new stories from existing ones, it is natural to wonder how to capture the simultaneous clarity and blurriness. Part of an answer came from studying a collection of archival photographs about the Mitis River from the 1940s. Black and white, grainy, and often obscured by marks of light damage, the pictures told dreamy stories. They feature nameless people gathering in undisclosed locations along the Mitis River.
Figure 3. the Angler’s Body, Technical Pen on Paper. 14 in. x 17 in, 2023. Jia Chen Mi.
Figure 4. Refuges near Eroding Shorelines, Technical Pen on Paper. 14 in. x 17 in., 2023. Jia Chen Mi.
Who are they, what are they doing there? Looking at these pictures, our minds can’t help but fill in the story’s details, which have faded with time. This experience recalls reading books written by W.G Sebald. A photographer and collector, Sebald punctuates his novels with mysterious black and white photographs, which leave readers uncertain if the images illustrate moments in the story or if the story was written by imagining the details surrounding them. As I began to build alternative stories from archival materials, I also started letting these stories create archival materials from the imagined past. Using a combination of digital tools such as prompting and collaging, a fabulated archive is created, making visible a world of increased interspecies connection.
Concurrently, interspecies storytelling and worldmaking are also explored through my drawing practice. In pre-digital architecture practice, pen and ink renders connected the existing reality with imagined ones. Ink dots, placed at varying densities, seamlessly blur the lines between the present and future by mimicking the grain of photography. Just like historical photographs, pen drawings’ ability to be at once sharp and blurry enables them to be a powerful tool for storytelling. If the digitally doctored archive allowed storytelling across time, historical ink rendering techniques helped me to depict complicated relations between beings across different scales and levels of definition.
The growing catalog of photographs and drawings tells the stories of a world very near the one we are experiencing. As this alternative place where humans and non-humans are bound in kinship becomes fleshed out, its architecture slowly awakens. When it does, it will start to materialize the new world within our existing one while facilitating the telling of more stories from animals, plants, fungi, and rocks to continuously fill narrative gaps.
Figure 5. Drowning 3, Technical Pen on Paper. 14 in. x 17 in., 2023. Jia Chen Mi.