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Vibok Works

Vibok Works.
Editing since 2010.
XIV BEAU Award / 'publications' and 'research' category, 2018.
FAD Award Thought and Criticism, 2011.
Founder: Paula V. Álvarez.
Internal partnership: Francisco Cruz, Teresa Jiménez, Alberto Vilches.
Vibok Works is an independent and experimental editorial practice, committed to critical thinking, sustained debate and the promotion of knowledge of architecture and the inhabited environment -as facts and as "possibility"- through the most diverse formats and projects. We pay special attention to issues and works that are particularly inaccessible to the public due to their uniqueness, their degree of experimentation or polemicity, or because of the challenge they pose to the dominant communication protocols in the market and in the mass media cultural framework.

The "economy of means" that presents itself as an optimal operational logic after the finantial crisis might lead to a fatal misunderstanding: the rejection of complex and decisive variables such as heterogeneity, disidence, transversality and virtuality. Apparently informed by the ecological, this criterion might inhibit the permanent self-critical reflection that is essential for the cultural sustainability of architecture.

Vibok Works proposes and commits itself to an alternative aspect: the promotion of an "ecology of the invisible". We assume that cultural productions are another ecological stratum: an active segment in the construction of the environment we inhabit. This suggests an uncanny connection between editing and architectural practices.

An ecology of the invisible.

As an independent publisher, Vibok Works aims to contribute to restoring a symbolic balance in the architectural contents that circulates in the public domain. Joining the critical perspective of cultural studies, we seek to create an editorial space for what, being valuable, tends to remain unnoticed, undervalued and hidden by the automatic and often unconscious reproduction of certain recurring patterns of valuation, action and communication.

As an experimental practice, our ambition is to create a place of border negotiation between the admitted and the excluded in the official architectural culture. Our tittles propose underestimated and inedit links between the internal debates that model the forms of architectural practice and the reflections about "the habitability" that take place in broader disciplinary and cultural environments.

We imagine our production not a sum of independent titles, but as a provisional intersubjective record of an ongoing mutation in the ways of thinking about architecture.