ANASTROPHES

In Greek, anastrophe means “turning back.”
A u-turn.
A return.
A point of reversal.

In English, anastrophe slips into grammar.
An inversion of the usual order of words or clauses.

From subject-verb-object to object-verb-subject.
The meaning stays—but our attention shifts
to what has been displaced.

A catastrophe, by contract, is a collapse.
A violent shift in the physical order of things.
An ending of a set of conditions.

We pay attention to catastrophes,
we read tham as events that are final.
After them, we live in materially changed environments.

Anastrophes are things we create in order to pay attention otherwise.
They are reshufflings.
Reweavings.

If catastrophes are things falling apart,
ANASTROPHES are things coming back together.

ANASTROPHES COLLECTIVE™

hello@anastrophes.earth
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We are a collective of spatial designers committed to pushing discipinary boundaries and collaborative action with communities on the frontlines of environmental struggle. Our practices are methodologically and materially diverse; committed to working together and with others, to critical narrative-building and engaged storytelling, to working across scales and mediums of social relations and political frameworks, and to always growing our practice in the direction of spatial and climate justice.

If you have any questions, concerns, or topics for us to address, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We are ready.

Claudia Lehmann is an artist, spatial practitioner, and researcher tracing currents from the high atmosphere to deep subsurface. Her practice examines infrastructures that enclose and extract from hydro-geo-cultural landscapes, utilising fieldwork and embodied methodologies. She grew up in Penwith, Cornwall, amidst mining histories, neolithic structures, and folkloric remnants, attuning her to entanglements of human and more-than-human forces.

Recent research includes non-mono-soon, co-developing ecological toolkits with South Indian communities restoring wetlands disrupted by colonial monocultures and changing climatic rhythms (CLIMAVORE x Jameel Emerging Practice Food Action Award, 2025); Confluences, mapping karstic landscapes threatened by energy developments in Eastern Crete; and metallophyte bal maiden, reclaiming post-industrial sites through mineral archives, labour, and experimental photography.

Claudia collaborates with communities, activists, and experts, prioritising reciprocity and ongoing engagement. She holds an MA in Environmental Architecture from the Royal College of Art and a BA in Drawing from Camberwell College of Arts.

Tima Rabbat is a spatial practitioner and architectural researcher based in London. Her work focuses on ecological networks and mutual dependencies, with a particular interest in the politicised territorialisation of space and the shifting notions of ownership and protection within changing environments.

She is the co-founder of ARD Studio, a studio established alongside Lea Kayrouz, exploring the intersections of architecture, ecology, and socio-political landscapes. Tima holds the position of Associate Lecturer for the MA City Design studio Underground Palestine, which examines heritage as a site for urban struggle in Palestine.

She earned her MA in Environmental Architecture from the Royal College of Art, London, after completing a BArch (Hons) at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.

Ava Xia is a multidisciplinary practitioner, researcher, and designer in environmental architecture based in London. Drawing and sound-making are her primary tools, and she holds a strong interest in climate change and ecological justice—both in terms of investigation and visualization. She is driven by the unwritten scripts of the landscape.

Her recent work explores and challenges the notion of static yet ever-changing borders, edges, and frontiers—across social, territorial, technological, sonic, and ecological architectures—while tracing the circulatory relationships between human and non-human collectives.

She holds degrees from the Royal College of Art and OCAD University.

Will Tooze is an architect and researcher based in London. He has worked internationally in architecture, research and publishing.

Will holds degrees from the Royal College of Art, the London School of Architecture and the University of Edinburgh.

Gabrielė Grigorjevaitė is an artist, researcher, writer and educator working at the intersection of architecture, design and ecology. Her current research traces forestry practices across the Baltic and Northern European regions, challenging ‘sustainability’ narratives that legitimise ecological violence. She has published and presented internationally, including recent contributions to Mustarinda Magazine, the Neringa Forest Classroom, and the Children’s Forest Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, among other forums. She has undertaken residencies at Mustarinda, Finland and Nida Art Colony, Lithuania. As an educator, Gabrielė has taught on the Interior aChristind Spatial Design programme at Camberwell College of Arts, bringing critical ecological and social perspectives into architectural education. Working as a freelance researcher with Superflux Studio and through independent commissions, she develops projects that connect research, teaching and design, while her practice as a permaculture designer and gardener extends ecological thinking into lived forms of care. She holds an MA in Environmental Architecture from the Royal College of Art.

Mingxin Li is an activist, researcher, and PhD candidate working on intergenerational knowledge transmission with the Tibetan community through spatial practice. Before undertaking his PhD at the Royal College of Art (RCA), he speculated on the symbiotic relationship between bacteria and stromatolites in Chile's Salar de Llamara as a way to resist lithium extraction (MA Environmental Architecture).

In 2025, he received the Alumni UK Climate Action Grant funded by the British Council for his participatory and community-based grass seeding actions and pedagogical sessions tackling current land degradation through Tibetan knowledge. In 2024, he received the Food Action Award (Emerging Practice) funded by CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA for his work on addressing the shrinkage of yak-herding wetlands in Zoige, located at the eastern edge of the Tibetan Plateau.

Currently, he works as an architectural researcher and project co-lead at INTERPRT studio, pursuing environmental justice, pursuing environmental justice through the co-production of visual evidence of environmental disputes with indigenous/local communities around the world.

Isabel Palacios-Macedo is an architect and writer drawn to the meeting point of spatial and spoken narratives. Through her work, she examines the currents that shape the archaeological narrative of landscapes, revealing the shifting power dynamics between humans and their environments, and how these spaces ultimately reclaim their presence.

As part of her research, she wrote a book of short stories reflecting on Mexico City’s water crisis and co-authored Ensayos II. Pensamientos sobre paisaje, a collaborative exploration of landscape from multiple professional perspectives. She holds a BArch from the School of Architecture at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), the MA Environmental Architecture from the Royal College of Art, and is pursuing a PhD in the Geography Department at King’s College London on Water Archaeology.

Jack Sieber is an Environmental Planner based in Los Angeles & London. His work spans research & development, programme management, and strategic engagement across public & private sectors to elevate collaborative conservation and community-led climate resilience at the intersection of nature-based solutions, regenerative design, and sociocultural uplift.

A graduate of the Royal College of Art’s Environmental Architecture (MA) programme, his award-winning thesis [recipient of 'Head of Programme Prize', selected for exhibition by the Royal Academy of Arts (2023) & Dubai Design Week (2023)] conceptualised a partnership network for sustainable landscape management strategies as a tool for ecological recovery in post-wildfire Greece. He's also spearheaded corporate, state, and tribal partnerships to operationalise reforestation initiatives on public lands throughout California's Sierra Nevada. Jack utilises participatory approaches to cooperative resource management that champion environmental stewardship as a path to social progress.

Paul Bröker is a multi-disciplinary landscape architect and urbanist based in London. Paul works primarily at the intersection of nature and the humanitarian and conservation worlds, leveraging regenerative design and nature-based solutions as processes for supporting co-created community resilience. He collaborates with a range of organisations across the private, NGO and IGO sectors including UN-Habitat. His research centres on elevating traditional ecological knowledge and local food cultures into strong and equitable political ecologies.

Paul holds degrees from the Royal College of Art, UCL and the University of Cambridge.

Christie Swallow is an artist and designer. Their work crafts kinship between species, fosters solidarity through co-creation and encourages exchange through collaborative making. Christie’s practice engages with issues of ecology, technoscience and heterodoxy, working through facilitation, curation and installation design, with a particular focus on textiles.

Christie was most recently Design Researcher in Residence at the Design Museum, where they researched Parakeets and urban ecology through guided walks, quilting and sound art. They have previously undertaken residencies at the European Commission, The University of Birmingham and Hangar CIA.

The 2020 recipient of the RIBA Boyd Auger Scholarship, Christie has exhibited widely and delivered programmes for organisations including Kew, Orleans House Gallery and the BBC. They previously studied at The Royal College of Art and The University of Cambridge, where they also held a visiting lectureship.

Vanessa Lastrucci is a landscape architect and educator working on environmental justice and ecology in an expanded sense. Her practice embraces both professional and academic work grounded in enquires on multi-specie cohabitation, critical conservation, the role of the more-than-human and the aesthetics of ecology.

She is Affiliated Faculty in the School of Architecture of Syracuse University in London and collaborates with landscape practices in London and in Europe.

She holds an MA Environmental Architecture from the Royal College of Art and a MArch from the University of Florence, Italy where she was raised.

Antonio del Guidice is an architect and researcher. His work focuses on spatial politics, environmental conflicts, and alternative modes of space production and ownership. He has collaborated with several architecture practices, including Architecten de Vylder Vinck Taillieu and June 14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff, as well as research institutions such as the Autonomy Institute. His interdisciplinary work includes co-authoring the article "Extractive Landscapes" for InactualMagazine and co-curating a special issue of Panopticon Magazine titled Wasteocene. This issue explored how waste politics in Italy’s Campania region reveal deeper histories of systemic exploitation and environmental injustice. His personal and collaborative projects have been exhibited at prominent international venues, including the Nieuwe Instituut (Rotterdam), Galeria Municipal (Porto), Färgfabriken (Stockholm), and CIVA(Brussels). In 2022, he joined 2,3,1000-GIT(Grupo de Investigação Territorial), an action-research organisation dedicated to social and environmental struggles. Until most recently, Antonio was an Associate Lecturer for the MA Environmental Architecture (Research Studio 4 Anemoi) at the Royal College of Art, London and a Guest Lecturer at the University of Brighton.
Currently, he is a doctoral student in Architecture at the Royal College of Art.

Aya El Khouri is an environmental architect, researcher, and photographer based between Beirut and London. Her work and interests span spatial and environmental justice, decolonial thinking, and the power of politics and climate in shaping landscapes, memory, and collective futures.

She holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Landscape Architecture (Hons.) from the American University of Beirut, and a Master’s Degree in Environmental Architecture from the Royal College of Art- where she has begun developing her research on atmospheric occupations, the inseparability of political and climatic conditions of geographies, and our relationship to this climate as a reflection of her understanding of what weather is: a continuous entanglement of meteorological, political, social, individual, and communal conditions.

Her work covers spatial design, research, and visual story-telling.

Marie Lehmann is a spatial designer, researcher, and multimedia artist whose work operates at the intersection of science, art, and design. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the entanglements between humans and the natural world, tracing questions of perception, agency, and the need to move beyond anthropocentrism.

Her current research investigates the ecological and social consequences of agro-industrial toxins in the landscapes of Alentejo, Portugal, exploring how these substances shape more-than-human worlds. Her practice seeks to amplify underrepresented voices, challenge systems of extraction and violence, and advocate for respect and equality for all living beings.

Currently she works with children in forest schools and other settings, fostering botanical literacy and embodied intelligence from an early age.

She holds an MA in Environmental Architecture from the Royal College of Art, a BA in Interior and Spatial Design from the University of the Arts London and a Foundation in Art and Design from the Arts University Bournemouth

Albie [left] and Puffy [right] are our intrepid leaders, always in search of the tastiest morsels and collective-action-play. They also double as security staff—never to be tricked, unless you carry treats or offer cuddles ;)

ANASTROPHES COLLECTIVE