This event brings together project convenor, Rafico Ruiz with two researchers, Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan (field-0), who participated in In the Hurricane, On the Land, a multiyear, collaborative research project undertaken by the CCA and supported by the Mellon Foundation. Their joint talk will explore which practices of return and reciprocity come to the foreground when undertaking research with land-based communities. They will navigate guiding questions that are at the heart of the research group’s forthcoming book: how can we tangibly document material and social relations across lands and waters, moving from family ties that bind communities together to often invisible infrastructures that connect them to centres of political power? How can architectural and other researchers amplify and create spaces for trust and community building?

Cheng and Zhan will share their field-driven research process that incorporates film and moving images to document the flows of water and sand through the Mekong River Basin, from the Tibetan Plateau in China through Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam, and outward—through these extractive networks—to Singapore. They will reflect on what they call an in progress “territorial statement” that mobilizes exhibition-making and community acts to reveal the hidden infrastructural and elemental connections of contemporary life throughout the river-defined region. Cheng and Zhan will think through the small but vital infrastructural acts of return and community reciprocity that can be built through an examination of the Karen Hill Tribe, a community living on raft houses above the submerged forests in the Vajiralongkorn Dam Reservoir in Thailand, whose lives rise and fall with the dam’s cyclical water releases.

Free and open to the public. Please register here.

Field-0 trials grounded, sensorial approaches to understanding planetary interconnectedness toward alternative common sense. Through fieldwork, following drifting bodies—be they sand, water or migrant workers, the practice seeks to attune our senses to material flows, planetary scales, intergenerational time, and all the life entangled in these processes.Founded by Jingru (Cyan) Cheng and Chen Zhan, field-0 operates at the intersection of architecture, anthropology, art and filmmaking. Their recent solo exhibitions include HOW MUCH WATTAGE IS ONE HANDBREADTH OF WATER at Storefront for Art and Architecture (New York, 2025) and RIPPLE RIPPLE RIPPLING at the Architectural Association (London, 2024). Their film work received the Architecture Short Film Award at the Milano Design Film Festival (2024) and the Best Short Film at the Venice Architecture Film Festival (2023).

Cyan is the Harvard GSD 2023 Wheelwright Prize recipient for Tracing Sand. Her work has been exhibited as part of Critical Zones at ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany (2020–22), Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2019), and Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), among others. She currently teaches at the Royal College of Art in London.

Chen is an artist, independent filmmaker, anthropologist, and UK-registered architect. She previously worked at Heatherwick Studio in London on high-profile projects, including the Changi Airport Terminal 5 in Singapore, Google Gradient Canopy Headquarters in California, US, and Maggie’s Cancer Care Centre in Leeds, UK.