Title: Manifesting Nomadic

Author: Owais Abid

Year: 2025

Abstract: “I ask you to consider ‘knowing’ as a non-unitary understanding of ‘knowledge’.”

Manifesting Nomadic is a design manifesto critically positioned in the fractured political context of Cyprus. Drawing initially from lasting legacies of colonial interference and conflict, the manifesto draws on ideas of constant becoming, temporality and nomadic thinking as a methodology for circumnavigating colonially influenced understandings of territory, settlement and permanence.
Presented as a fragmented collection of field notes, it jumps between ideas across pages and squeezes between other notes; A personal documentation of thought. The gaps between these fragments, the creative leap between ideas, are expanded with academic writing, creating a dichotomy that represents the ‘transposition’ (Braidotti, 2012) I aim to embrace as a means of embodying a nomadic creative practice.
Whilst the format is an experiment in practicing a nomadic epistemology in the context of academic institution, the content theorises ontological responses to the contestations that designers find themselves facing in the Cypriot political context.
As such, the manifesto poses the question; How can a speculative architectural imagination facilitate the production of social futures in a fractured context left paralysed as a consequence of colonial interference and controlling geopolitical narratives? Beyond this, how can we strive for change today, whilst working within the realities of this existing situation?