For the launch of the book La ville sans cesse 1, Le désert, Jeremy Lecomte invites Francesco Sebregondi and Soline Nivet to discuss contemporary practices of architectural enquiry. What is architecture's power of critical analysis? How can this form of critical analysis help to transform the spaces in which we live? At the crossroads of the legacy of Learning From Las Vegas (1972) and the work undertaken by Forensic Architecture since 2010, the conversation will focus on the analytical, pedagogical and militant dimensions of what can now be called investigative architecture.

La ville sans cesse 1, Le désert brings together work carried out with students from the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture Versailles around Marfa, in the Chihuahua desert, close to the Mexican border in south-west Texas. A selection of these works will be exhibited at Glassbox. The book, edited by Jeremy Lecomte in collaboration with Hugo Soucaze and Valentine Ballouhey, will be available for purchase at 15 euros.

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* Jeremy Lecomte is a researcher and theorist working at the intersection of art, architecture and political ecology. He is a Senior Lecturer (SHSA) at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Versailles, where he heads up the project studio 'La ville sans cesse', the research seminar 'Philosophie politique de la nature', and the degree group 'Fictions critiques'. Alongside his research and teaching activities, he regularly collaborates with artists and architects on various exhibition and construction projects. He is also co-founder and co-editor of the art and theory journal Glass Bead, and a member of Theory's Curriculum.

* Soline Nivet is a DPLG architect with a doctorate in architecture, professor and member of the Architecture Culture Society Laboratory. She has been teaching at ENSA Paris-Malaquais since 2010. Her teaching approach is deliberately cross-disciplinary, combining theory and practice, research and the profession, history and current affairs, as these are the areas of architecture today. Her work explores both the immediate history of the Paris metropolis and the tensions and interactions between the conception of architectural projects and the ordinary procedures of their production. As the curator of several exhibitions and an architecture critic, she is the author of several books and numerous articles. Trained in documentary techniques and sound writing, she has devoted several radio programmes to contemporary urban phenomena.

* Francesco Sebregondi is an architect and researcher. His work explores the intersections of violence, the media and the urban condition. Since 2021, he has been the director/founder of INDEX, an independent consultancy based in France. Between 2011 and 2020, he was a researcher and project coordinator at Forensic Architecture, as well as co-editor of its first collective publication Forensis: The Architecture of Public Truth (Sternberg Press, 2014). In 2019 he completed his PhD at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London, where his research examined the architecture of the Gaza blockade. He is currently a research associate at EnsadLab in Paris.