Symposium: Unbuilding the Pyrocene

Nigel Clark is Professor of Human Geography at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011) and co-author with Bronislaw Szerszynski of Planetary Social Thought (2021). His current work looks at connections between the inner and outer Earth, the evolution of human care, deep histories of explosive violence, and planetary reason.

Luis Fernández-Galiano is an architect, critic and editor based in Madrid. His work spans architectural history and theory, contemporary criticism and the relationship between built form, technology and environmental modernity. He is widely known for long-standing editorial leadership in architectural publishing and for writing that connects architectural culture to wider political and ecological questions. He is the author of several books, including Fire and Memory, which used fire as a prompt to introduce thermodynamic perspectives into architectural history and theory. 

Stephen J. Pyne is Regents Professor Emeritus at Arizona State University, where he spent most of his career in the School of Life Sciences, Human Dimensions group. Trained as both a historian and a former wildfire firefighter, his work has been central to understanding fire as a driver of ecological change, land management, and cultural history. He has written extensively on the history of wildland fire and is widely known for influential books including Fire in America and The Pyrocene. His research and public writing connect fire regimes to institutions, ideas, and environmental governance.

Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have created multi-media art projects about love, sex and queer ecologies together since 2002. The duo have held gallery exhibitions of multimedia artworks. They also create performance art, walking tours and produce eco-activist symposiums. Their book, Assuming the Ecosexual Position: The Earth as Lover, chronicles their epic love story and art/life adventures. Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency is the third in their trilogy of feature films that explore environmental issues through an ecosexual lens.

Khairani Barokka is a writer and artist from Jakarta, based in London. Okka’s work has been presented widely internationally, and centres disability justice as anticolonial praxis, environmental justice, and access as translation. She has been a UNFPA Indonesian Young Leader Driving Social Change, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Asian Women of Achievement Awards. Her books include Indigenous Species (Tilted Axis), Ultimatum Orangutan (Nine Arches), shortlisted for the Barbellion Prize, and amuk (Nine Arches), longlisted for the Jhalak Poetry Prize. Her most recent exhibition was 2025's 'Kerokan Pol' films for Grand Union, and 2025's Annah, Infinite (Tilted Axis, The Bookseller’s Expert Pick) is her prose debut.

Byuka Makodru (they/them) is a trans, migrant artist-curator based in London. They worldbuild across media through immersive performances, community rituals, film, visual arts and speculative fiction writing. Their practice explores folk futurism through multispecies myth-making, queer gothic lore and animist witchcraft. They co-curated ‘Burned House Horizon’ an Arts Council England-funded exhibition on queer future ancestry and speculative archaeology (Mimosa House and QUEERCIRCLE, 2024-25), and they are the founder and lead researcher/facilitator of Lunarrr Playgroundz - a ritual healing space for the queer community. They explore how their work can be both a vigil for the dead and a spellcasting circle for our most vulnerable prayers.

Giulia Casalini (they/she) is a freelance curator-artist-researcher based in London and with over 15 years of experience working alongside queer, trans, and gender-expansive artists worldwide. Their curatorial practice is understood as a path of healing relationships – human, non-human, and planetary – and of unlearning colonial patterns in knowledge-making, work praxis, social relationality, and institutional logic. They hold a PhD in transnational queer-trans-feminist live art and have been co-founder and artistic director of the non-profit arts organisation Arts Feminism Queer (Cuntemporary, 2012-21).

Crisolita Fonseca is an architect, urban planner and researcher holding a PhD in Urbanism, with extensive experience across professional practice, academia, and research in Cabo Verde and Portugal. Since 2022, she has served as a jury member for academic awards promoted by the Order of Architects of Cabo Verde. Her work integrates architecture, urban planning and territorial development. She has contributed to international research projects, scientific publications and academic events, notably the European SOS Climate Waterfront (Marie Curie)project and the Sensorial research initiative. In parallel, she has led and managed diverse architectural and urban projects.

Dr Lo Marshall (they/them) is an Ethics Co-Director and Lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Drawing on interdisciplinary and intersectional approaches, their research and teaching engages with queer and trans spatial justice across UK cities, particularly London, and with a focus on nightlife, community spaces, and everyday life.

Maria Rita Pais is an architect, researcher and Associate Professor at Universidade Lusófona, where she coordinates the Architecture Doctorate and the CIAUD-LUSÓFONA-ISMAT hub. With a PhD from FAUL, her work intersects history, theory and artistic practice. A distinguished curator and FCT jury member, her projects include the FAD Award-winning Viagem ao Invisível and the European SOS Climate Waterfront Marie Curie project. Recently, she was awarded the 19th Távora Prize (2023) for her research on 'Hard-Heritage', focusing on bunker architecture and memory politics. She maintains extensive international academic collaborations with institutions in Ljubljana, Manchester, Bologna, the Bartlett and East Anglia.

Pedro Filipe Coutinho Cabral D’Oliveira Quaresma holds a PhD from Departamento de Arquitectura da Universidade de Coimbra, with part of his studies undertaken at MIT’s Design and Computation Group. He is Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at Universidade Lusófona, Lisbon, where he teaches in the PhD programme and serves as Vice-Director of the Department of Architecture and Urbanism, Director of the Integrated Master’s in Architecture, and is a former Vice-Director of the LEAU Research Laboratory. He has previously taught at FAUL, Instituto Superior Técnico and the University of Coimbra. Filipe has run his own architectural practice since 1999.

Liam Ross is an architect, teacher and researcher. His research studies the way architecture and urban design have been shaped by fire and fire-safety regulation, considering the governmentalities embedded within codes and norms, as well as the surprising side-effects that standards have as they are captured and re-interpreted by those who work closely with them. His teaching at the University of Edinburgh and London School of Architecture addresses historical, theoretical, legal and technical aspects of fire-safety design.

Prem Sahib is an artist whose work references the architecture of public and private spaces, structures that shape individual and communal identities, senses of belonging, alienation and confinement. Mixing the personal and political, abstraction and figuration, Sahib's formalism is suggestive of the body as well as its absence, drawing attention to traces of touch and frameworks of looking. Their work is in the collections of Tate, The Arts Council, Government Art Collection, The Royal Academy, UK; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, USA; Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art, Norway; X Museum, Beijing, China; and MONA, Australia. That Fire Over There, an artist’s book developed from Descent, Sahib’s three-part show (2019-20) was published by Book Works in 2023. 

Adam Walls is a lecturer in architectural studies at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His research focuses on the elements, particularly light, fire and atmosphere, and he works at the intersection of queer theory, critical whiteness studies and new materialisms. Adam previously worked in architectural practice before completing his PhD at UCL, where he is also co-author of the open-access curriculum ‘Race’ and Space (2020). Current research involves the collaborative project 'Transatlantic Fire' with Stamatis Zografos, Maria Rita Pais, Filipe Quaresma and Crisolita Fonesca; an article 'Pyrosexuality: Flaming, Fossil Fuels and Queer London'; and a larger project Straight White Light: Lighting Imperial London.

Kapil Yadav is a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Fire, Livelihoods and Biodiversity at Royal Holloway, University of London. His work sits at the intersection of political ecology, environmental anthropology, and critical disaster studies. He is broadly interested in the politics of fire governance; his PhD examined how fire is entangled with rural livelihoods and the state’s territorial control practices in India. His current research explores the role of insurance in fire risk reduction in South Africa. He is a National Geographic Explorer and holds an MSc in Environmental Change and Management from the University of Oxford and a BTech from IIT Bombay.

Tim Waterman is Professor of Landscape Theory at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His research addresses imaginaries: moral, political, social, ecological, radical, and utopian. His work scaffolds between world-making imaginaries and practices of everyday life to effect the transformation of both. He has published several books, most recently The Landscape of Utopia: Writings on Everyday Life, Taste, Democracy, and Design. He is currently working on a tetralogy of related monographs, the first of which is Reworlding: Planetarity and Design Imaginaries. This will be followed by The Magical Extraction of the Curse of Labour, Good Things, and Frugality’s Futurity: On Grace.

Stamatis Zografos is an architect and Associate Professor in Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is also a co-founder of Incandescent Square – an interdisciplinary platform for research – and a founding member of the Institute of Psychoanalytic Studies in Architecture (iPSA). His research lies at the intersection of architecture, critical heritage studies and psychoanalysis and engages with the element of fire approached through an interdisciplinary lens. He is the author of Architecture and Fire, A Psychoanalytic Approach to Conservation published in 2019 by UCL Press and co-editor of Urban Violence and Marginalised Communities: Transdisciplinary Interpretations published in 2026 by UCL Press. 

Oana Tenter is a documentary-maker from Romania, based in California after graduating UCSC's MFA in Social Documentation on a Fulbright scholarship. She has been a Union Docs and Flaherty fellow. Her visual work has shown at PSNY, IAS Santa Cruz, and the NYT, and her writing appears in The Guardian, The Evening Standard, and Internazionale. She has co-produced (with Keith Wilson)) and assisted edited Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle's film Playing with Fire. Currently, she is working on her first feature documentary, Yesterday Ended Last Night as well as co-directing the short fiction Beyond the Horizon Line.