In June 2026, Barcelona will once again position itself at the centre of global architectural discourse as it hosts the UIA World Congress of Architects 2026 (UIA2026BCN). Thirty years after its landmark 1996 edition, the Congress returns at a moment of profound planetary, political and cultural transition. Organised by the International Union of Architects (UIA) and led locally by the Higher Council of the Orders of Architects of Spain (CSCAE) in collaboration with the Architects’ Association of Catalonia (COAC), UIA2026BCN unfolds under the theme Becoming. Architectures for a Planet in Transition—a call to rethink architecture not as a fixed object, but as a process shaped by time, ecology, politics and memory.
Designated by UNESCO as World Capital of Architecture 2026, Barcelona becomes more than a host city; it is framed as a living laboratory where architecture confronts climate urgency, post-industrial transformation, mass tourism, housing precarity, cultural identity and the long afterlives of colonial power. It is within this charged urban and historical context that one of the Congress’s most forward-looking initiatives takes place: the International Emerging Workshop.
A Global Laboratory for the Next Generation
Conceived as a real-time, week-long design laboratory, the International Emerging Workshop is a special Congress format dedicated to students and young practitioners from around the world. Running from 19 to 27 June 2026, just ahead of the main Congress, the programme brings together twelve recognised emerging international practices, each leading a workshop aligned with one of the six conceptual pillars of Becoming.
Participants—organised into twelve groups of up to fifteen—will work collaboratively from Les Tres Xemeneies de Sant Adrià de Besòs, one of Barcelona’s most emblematic post-industrial sites. Through lectures, site visits, conversations and hands-on research, the workshop fosters cross-cultural and interdisciplinary exchange, positioning Barcelona itself as what the curatorial team describes as a “wicked laboratory”: a place where unresolved tensions and systemic crises become fertile ground for architectural experimentation.
Among these twelve workshops, one stands out for its incisive engagement with colonial history, migration, material flows and the politics of mapping: ‘Revised Cartographies’, led by Ibiye Camp.
‘Revised Cartographies’: Dismantling Colonial and Geopolitical Inscriptions
‘Revised Cartographies’ is one of the Congress’s Becoming Hyper-Conscious workshops, and it directly confronts the often-unseen colonial infrastructures embedded in Barcelona’s urban fabric. Led by British Nigerian multidisciplinary artist and architect Ibiye Camp, the workshop proposes a process of scanning, mapping and material transformation to interrogate how colonialism and geopolitical flows have shaped—and continue to shape—the city.
Barcelona’s rise as a global port city is inseparable from its colonial entanglements, maritime trade routes and extractive economies. Yet it is also a city with a long history of resistance to colonial ideology. From the 1960s onward, Barcelona-based publishers and intellectuals openly challenged colonial culture and authoritarian power during the Franco dictatorship. ‘Revised Cartographies’ situates itself precisely within this duality: a city complicit in colonial extraction, yet capable of critical self-reflection and symbolic rupture.
The workshop invites participants to engage directly with sites where these tensions are inscribed in space. Among them is the Columbus Monument, a towering symbol of imperial conquest and transatlantic expansion. In sharp contrast stands Plaça Idrissa Diallo, one of the most politically charged public spaces in contemporary Barcelona. Here, the public actively removed the legacy of a man who profited from slavery and renamed the square in honour of Idrissa Diallo, a young Guinean man who died in a migrant detention centre. This act of collective remembrance and resistance becomes a central case study for the workshop, illustrating how public space can be reclaimed as a site of ethical and historical reorientation.
Mapping Through Materials, Movement and Memory
‘Revised Cartographies’ moves beyond conventional architectural analysis by employing experimental tools and material practices. Participants will be introduced to photogrammetry at Port Vell, using scanning technologies to explore Barcelona’s relationship with the sea, its port infrastructure and the global movements of people, goods and power that pass through it.
The workshop also foregrounds the material economies of colonialism and diaspora. Participants will source ingredients from Kumasi Market and visit Museu Torre Balldovina in Santa Coloma de Gramenet, tracing the presence of African diasporic communities across the metropolitan area. Through the use of natural dyes, they will map these spaces in ways that are both sensorial and symbolic.
Materials such as minerals, crude oil and cocoa—sourced from countries including Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana—are woven into the workshop’s activities. These materials, omnipresent yet often invisible in European cities, become critical agents for understanding how extractive economies and colonial trade routes are embedded in everyday urban life. By working with them directly, participants are encouraged to confront the geopolitical histories carried by matter itself.
The workshop’s theoretical grounding is reinforced by a shared reading of Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection, a foundational text that interrogates the afterlives of slavery, domination and racialized power. In dialogue with Hartman’s writing, ‘Revised Cartographies’ asks how architecture and mapping can be retooled not to reproduce systems of control, but to expose, question and reimagine them.
Ibiye Camp: Architecture, Technology and the African Diaspora
At the heart of ‘Revised Cartographies’ is the practice of Ibiye Camp, whose work operates at the intersection of architecture, art, technology and postcolonial critique. A British Nigerian multidisciplinary artist, Camp engages deeply with questions of trade, infrastructure and materiality within the African diaspora.
Her practice employs architectural tools—drawing, mapping, scanning and spatial analysis—to reveal the biases, exclusions and conflicts embedded in technological systems. Through projects in Sierra Leone, Nigeria and Ethiopia, Camp has investigated how digital infrastructure interacts with landscape, often exposing the glitches, frictions and inequalities that emerge when global technologies are imposed on local contexts.
Camp holds an MA in Architecture from the Royal College of Art, and her work has been presented at major international platforms, including the Sharjah Architecture Triennial (2019) and the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia (2023). Across these contexts, her practice consistently challenges dominant narratives of progress, asking who benefits from technology, whose histories are erased, and how architecture can act as a tool for critical consciousness.
Why ‘Revised Cartographies’ Matters
Within the expansive programme of the UIA World Congress of Architects 2026, ‘Revised Cartographies’ distinguishes itself through its ethical urgency and methodological inventiveness. It does not treat colonialism as a closed chapter of history, but as an active force shaping migration policies, urban symbols, material economies and spatial hierarchies today.
By centring African diasporic presence in Barcelona and engaging with acts of public resistance such as Plaça Idrissa Diallo, the workshop offers participants a framework for architectural practice that is politically aware, materially grounded and historically accountable. It asks future architects and spatial practitioners not only to design buildings, but to question the maps—literal and metaphorical—that structure our understanding of the world.
As Barcelona becomes a global stage for architectural debate in 2026, Ibiye Camp’s ‘Revised Cartographies’ stands as a powerful reminder that architecture’s future depends on its willingness to confront its past—and to redraw the lines through which space, power and memory are organised.
