The human being processes are characterized by developing mental elaborations in which the mind stores, builds or interprets information that is contributed by our senses, and of which it will use at certain times, when said elaboration is useful and / or necessary in the daily life. In that sense, the provocation to conform / compose / bring to light a manifesto that expands beyond the confines of a specific group of people, gathered under a common objective and in a historical moment that confronts us with questioning many of the ideas that we took for granted, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic; paradoxically it has allowed us to come together and gather many ideas that have grown in number over the months.

The Mental Manifesto is a compilation of the first group of questions generated until November 17, 2020 posted by curators and participants of the national pavilions gathered in this initiative.

This approach to the manifesto starts from the idea of ​​how we are processing / placing / ordering the information that comes to us, in groups by categories of similarity, it allows us to glimpse the main tendencies of the questions expressed.

We started by asking: Start where? And as the questions were rereaded over and over again, similarities in approach began to appear, so these emerging categories began to emerge:

• Architecture as a discipline (11)
• Philosophical aspects (10)
• Methodology: How to do it? (3)
• Society (7)
• Theory (6)

We observed that the greatest number of concerns at the time was related to architecture as a discipline and the philosophical aspects that have to do with it. Beyond the idea of ​​cataloging in watertight rooms without apparent communication, relationships started to emerge between the questions, regardless of the category in which they were initially grouped.

This is something similar to what happens with mental processes: we have a series of ordered facts, and then we begin to relate them to elements that, although they do not have similarity, have some level of relationship so that this same process helps us to understand the question studied. The Mental manifesto, was opened as an approach to the study of the conceptual associations between the first collected questions and to see that in the graphing of the same, that the canvas becomes a tangle of relationships between the questions that are intersecting and even grouping from different categories, which are at their very root, concepts that permeate the great questions that as a discipline have a direct impact on the human being and the world we inhabit.

This is just a first step or attempt to understand and string together a great mantle of questions about architecture, its impact on our lives and how we will continue with it from now on, this is just a beginning.

Orisell Medina-Lagrange, Santo Domingo, November 17, 2020