Date:
Location: Geneva , Switzerland Department of Interior Architecture at HEAD – Genève (HES-SO)Contact: Roberto Zancan
Email: roberto.zancan@hesge.ch
Department of Interior Architecture at HEAD – Genève (HES-SO), Geneva
8–9 December 2025
This event seeks to explore the ways in which performative approaches to archaeology open up new spaces for reflection and experimentation, renewing our relationship with existing structures, heritage sites, and historical objects. By engaging with immersive devices, situated narratives, in situ activation protocols, and contemporary technologies of capture and representation (moving images, sound, 3D modeling), such practices generate embodied, critical, and accessible forms of knowledge.
The seminar aims not only to document and preserve, but also to interrogate fundamental questions: How does a site become a space for narratives? How does an artifact acquire agency within contemporary debates? Which voices, memories, and experiences are excluded, and how might they be rendered tangible? Our ambition is to lay the foundations for a comprehensive state-of-the-art review of these performative interventions, considering them as tools for rethinking interior architecture—not merely as a project-based discipline, but as a field capable of reshaping historical narratives and transforming social practices.
The expected outcomes are both theoretical and applied: on the one hand, broadening the scope of heritage studies toward a more critical, post-disciplinary, and sensory approach; on the other, directly informing the teaching methods, research tools, and field practices developed within the framework of the Master’s in Interior Architecture (MAIA) at HEAD – Genève.
The seminar will also provide a forum for presenting ongoing and emerging experiments at the intersection of artistic creation, archaeology, architecture, and design research. Contributions will highlight concrete examples of site activations, critical investigations into representations of the past, and collaborative methodologies for reinterpreting forgotten or contested sites. These results will inform the structuring of a field of expertise within HEAD – Genève, where the tools of archaeology are reimagined as instruments of creative experimentation on memory, materiality, narrative, and spatial imagination.
In this perspective, the symposium intends not only to surface new issues related to interventions on existing structures—particularly in light of contemporary social, ecological, and technological challenges—but also to consolidate hybrid and reflexive methodologies capable of sustainably transforming professional practices in interior design, conservation, and artistic creation.
