We are entering a fire-age. Anthropogenic burning of fossil fuel has altered the Earth’s atmosphere and climates. As the ice sheets melt, and wildfires blaze, fire creates the condition for more fire. Stephen Pyne has named this period the ‘Pyrocene’, an alternative term for the Anthropocene which draws an analogy with the Ice Ages. To survive in the Pyrocene, humans need to urgently transform their relationship with fire.
What insight does this planetary perspective offer to those working in built-environment and creative disciplines, and vice versa? How has the Pyrocene been built? How might we begin to unbuild or build otherwise? How might fire help us to break down and rethink the category of the ‘human’? How do we queer and decolonise the Pyrocene?
These questions are explored through two free, public symposia, Building the Pyrocene and Unbuilding the Pyrocene. Organised by Liam Ross, Stamatis Zografos and Adam Walls. They are funded and hosted by Edinburgh College of Art and the Bartlett School of Architecture, with the support of the Instituto Cervantes and B.Queer.
Speakers
Stephen Pyne
Author and Professor (Arizona State University)
Stephen J. Pyne is Regents Professor Emeritus in the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. 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.
Luis Fernández-Galiano
Architect, critic and editor (Madrid School of Architecture, Arquitectura Viva)
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 many books, including Fire and Memory, which used fire as a prompt to introduce thermodynamic perspectives into architectural history and theory.
https://arquitecturaviva.com/tag/luis-fernandez-galiano
Nigel Clark
Professor (Lancaster University)
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.
Nigel Clark – Lancaster University
Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens
Artists, Filmmakers and Professor (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Beth Stephens & Annie Sprinkle have created multi-media art projects about love, sex, and queer ecologies together since 2002. The duo has gallery exhibitions of multimedia artworks, they create performance art, walking tour rituals, and they 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.
Sprinkle Stephens | Annie Sprinkle & Beth Stephens The Collaboration
Khairani Barokka
Writer and Artist
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.
Adam Bobbette
Lecturer (University of Glasgow)
Adam Bobbette is a human geographer and political geologist. His research examines how environmental problems—particularly climate change, air, and atmospheric governance—are shaped through political, scientific, and institutional practices. Working across political theory and environmental humanities, he is interested in how concepts of responsibility, expertise, and collective life are reorganised by ecological crises. His first book The Pulse of the Earth explores how modern theories of the earth emerged from the slopes of Indonesian volcanoes, as a fusion of Western and non-Western cosmology, theology, anthropology, and geology.
https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/ges/staff/adambobbette/#biography
Byuka aka Fortune Tailed Beast
Visual & movement artist, witch, writer, independent researcher
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.Instagram
Giulia Casalini
Curator, Artist and Researcher
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).
https://www.instagram.com/queer___femme/
Prem Sahib
Artist
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.
https://www.phillidareid.com/artists/prem-sahib
Mellissa Sterry
Futurist and designer
Mellissa Sterry is a futurist and designer whose work explores how emerging technologies and speculative methods can be used to examine environmental change and societal risk. She is known for interdisciplinary practice spanning future-facing research, public engagement, and the development of provocation-led projects that connect science, culture, and policy. Her work frequently addresses climate and ecological futures, and the narratives and infrastructures that shape how societies anticipate and respond to disruption. Her Panarchic Codex investigates the dynamics of wildfire-adapted ecosystems and how their principles might inspire sustainable, resilient human habitats.
https://www.melissasterry.com/
Kapil Yadav
Postdoctoral Researcher (Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society, Royal Holloway, University of 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.
Kapil Yadav – Royal Holloway Research Portal
Maria Rta Pais
Associate Professor (Lusófona University/Universidade de Lisboa)
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, Bartlett and East Anglia.
https://www.cienciavitae.pt/portal/pt/1017-6EE4-C705
https://www.facebook.com/maria.r.pais/
Crisolita Fonseca
Architect, urban planner, and researcher
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.
Liam Ross
Architect, Senior Lecturer (University of Edinburgh)
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 govern-mentalities embedded within codes and norms, as well as the surprising side-effects that standards have as they are capture and re-interpreted by those who work closely with them. His teaching at the University of Edinburghi and London School of Architecture addresses historical, theoretical, legal and technical aspects of fire-safety design.
https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/en/persons/liam-ross/
Adam Walls
Lecturer (UCL)
Adam Walls is a lecturer in architectural studies at the Bartlett, 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.
Adam Walls | About | University College London
Stamatis Zografos
Architect, Associate Professor (UCL)
Stamatis Zografos is an architect and Associate Professor in Architecture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. 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.
https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/55565-stamatis-zografos
