Date:
Location:
Speakers: Pedro Ignacio Alonso, Head of the PhD Program in Architecture and Urban Studies, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Cara Daggett, Associate Professor of Political Science, Virginia Tech; Jota Mombaça, Artist based in Brazil, Germany, and Portugal; Marina Otero Verzier, Head of the Social Design Masters Program, Design Academy Eindhoven; Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, Artist based in Guatemala; Elizabeth Wagemann, Director of the City and Territory Lab, Universidad Diego Portales. Respondents and Moderatos: Bruno Carvalho, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African American Studies, Harvard University; Thomas B.F.Cummins, Dumbarton Oaks Professor of the History of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art, Harvard University and Director, Dumbarton Oaks; Patricio del Real, Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University; Inés Katzenstein, Curator and Director, Cisneros Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America, MoMA; Thaisa Way, Director of the Garden & Landscape Studies, Dumbarton Oaks and Lecturer in Landscape Architecture, Harvard University
Energies and Imaginations brings together scholars, artists, architects, and designers to reflect and speculate on the perils and potentials of energy transitions in Latin America. How are creative practices harnessing the material, social, and spiritual dimensions of energy, and drawing upon the imagination of renewal in the current ecological crossroads? How might collective aspirations and artistic imaginations reframe questions of futures in transition?
This initiative is a collaboration between curators and scholars from the Cisneros Institute at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Dumbarton Oaks, DRCLAS Art Film and Culture Program, the Mellon Urban Initiative at Harvard University and the Harvard Department of History of Art and Architecture. In 2021, they collectively organized the online research seminar, Recreating Territories: Art and Urban Imaginations, a series of conversations with scholars, artists, and designers to reflect on urban territories in Latin America amid an intensification of ecological and political crises. It is also part of a longstanding research topic of the Cisneros Institute, on questions of art and ecology in Contemporary Latin America.
The panel will be structured in two parts: a first session will feature short presentations by guest scholars and artists, followed by a round table discussion and an open Q&A with the public.
-2.30-2:45pm
Welcome Remarks and Presentation Energies and Imaginations by Inés Katzenstein and Thomas Cummins.
-2:45- 4:15 pm
Speaker Presentations
15 ́ Cara Daggett
15 ́ Marina Otero Verzier
15 ́ Pedro Ignacio Alonso
15 ́ Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa
15 ́ Elizabeth Wagemann
15 ́ Jota Mombaça
-4:15- 4:30 pm
Coffee Break
-4:30-5:30 pm
Round Table Discussion moderated by Bruno Carvalho, Patricio del Real and Thaisa Way + Q&A
Speakers
Pedro Ignacio Alonso holds a PhD in architecture from the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, and heads the PhD program in architecture and urban studies at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He was a Princeton-Mellon Fellow at Princeton University in 2015–16, and was resident architect at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre in 2019. With Hugo Palmarola, he was awarded the 2014 Silver Lion for the Chilean Pavilion Monolith Controversies at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and they received the 2014 Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) Book Award for their companion book. Alonso and Palmarola also published the book Panel (2014), curated the exhibition Flying Panels: How Concrete Panels Changed the World at the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design in 2019–20, and are the curators, together with Eden Medina, of the upcoming exhibition How to Design a Revolution: The Chilean Road to Design in Santiago’s La Moneda Cultural Center (2023–24).
Cara Daggett is an associate professor of political science at Virginia Tech. She researches the politics of energy and the environment, feminist studies of science and technology, and histories of empire. Her book The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work (2019) was awarded the Clay Morgan Award for best book in environmental political theory and the Yale H. Ferguson Book Award from the International Association Northeast, and has been translated into multiple languages. Her work has been published in journals including Environmental Politics, Energy Research & Social Science, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, and the International Feminist Journal of Politics. She has also enjoyed public-facing writing, podcasting, and engagements with artists and architects around questions of energy, and especially how human activities are organized and valued.
Jota Mombaça is an interdisciplinary artist whose work unfolds in a variety of mediums. The sonic and visual matter of words plays an important role in her practice, which often relates to anticolonial critique and gender disobedience. Her work has been presented in several institutional frameworks, such as the 32nd and 34th São Paulo Biennale (2016 and 2020/2021), the 22nd Sydney Biennale (2020), the 10th Berlin Biennale (2018), and the 46th Salon Nacional de Artistas in Colombia (2019). Currently, she is interested in researching elemental forms of sensing, anticolonial imagination, and the relation between opacity and self-preservation in the experience of racialized trans artists in the global art world.
Marina Otero Verzier is head of the social design masters program at Design Academy Eindhoven. In 2022 she received Harvard University’s Wheelwright Prize for a project on the future of data storage. From 2015 to 2022, she was the director of research at Het Nieuwe Instituut, where she led initiatives focused on labor, extraction, and mental health from an architectural and post-anthropocentric perspective. Previously, she was director of global network programming at Studio-X, Columbia University GSAPP, in New York. Otero has curated exhibitions such as Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains, at Galería Municipal do Porto in 2023; Work, Body, Leisure, the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018; and After Belonging, the Oslo Architecture Triennale in 2016. She is co-editor of Automated Landscapes (2023), Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), More-than-Human (2020), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), Work, Body, Leisure (2018), and After Belonging (2016), among others.
Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa’s multidisciplinary work incorporates performance, sound, drawing, and sculpture, exploring themes of loss, displacement, and cultural resistance. Recurring subjects include the Guatemalan Civil War, approached with an absurd and humorous touch that never diminishes its historical weight. His work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museo de Arte Moderno de Medellín and Bogotá; Museum Leuven; Times Art Center, Berlin; Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; The Power Plant and Toronto Biennial of Art, Toronto; Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, Mexico City; New Museum, New York; daadgalerie, Berlin; CAPC musée d’art contemporain, Bordeaux; Venice Biennale; Haus Esters, Krefeld Kunstmuseum; Gasworks, London; Lyon Biennale; Gwangju Biennale; and Tate Modern, London, among others. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim, Inga Maren Otto, Artpace Residency, Mies Van Der Rohe prize, Franklin Furnace award, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and the DAAD Berlin Artists-in-Residence fellowship. He holds a BFA from Emily Carr University and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with a research fellowship at Jan van Eyck Academy in 2013. He is based in Guatemala City.
Elizabeth Wagemann is the director of the City and Territory Lab (LCT) at Universidad Diego Portales, Chile. She is an architect and holds an MA in architecture from the Universidad Católica (Chile) and an MPhil and PhD in architecture from the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on post-disaster housing, resilience, and sustainable development. Her presentations include the TEDx “From Shelter to Home after Disasters” (2018) and “Living with Uncertainty” at Congreso Futuro (2019). She has published several articles on post-disaster housing and is co-author of Disaster Risk Reduction Including Adaptation to Climate Change for Housing and Settlements (2017) and Resilience, Reconstruction and Sustainable Development in Chile (2019). She has been a research associate at the University of Cambridge, a postdoctoral researcher at CEDEUS and CIGIDEN (Chile), a professor at Universidad Católica (Chile), Universidad Mayor (Chile), and Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador (PUCE), and a visiting professor at University College London.
Respondents and moderators
Bruno Carvalho researches and teaches on the history and experiences of urbanization. He is writing The Invention of the Future: A Transatlantic History of Urbanization (under contract with Princeton University Press), on the competing and shared aspirations of city dwellers and urban planners throughout modernity. Carvalho authored the award-winning Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro, published in Brazil in an expanded edition. He has co-edited multiple books, and published on topics related to cities, politics, the visual arts, and literature. Carvalho co-edits the book series Lateral Exchanges, on the built environment. At Harvard, Carvalho is Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and African and African American Studies, Affiliated Professor in Urban Planning and Design at the Graduate School of Design, Co-Director of the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative, and co-Chair of the Art, Film, & Culture Committee at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies.
Thomas B. F. Cummins is the Dumbarton Oaks Professor of the History of Pre-Columbian and Colonial Art in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University and Director of the Dumbarton Oaks Institute. He is the author, editor, or co editor of ten books, the latest of which is Sacred Matters: Animacy and Authority in the Americas, co edited with Steve Koisiba and John Janusek and published by Dumbarton Oaks in 2020. Cummins served as the Director of the University of Chicago Center for Latin American Studies, the Interim Director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard, the Chair of the Department of History of Art and Architecture, and Member of the Comisión Sectorial del Sistema Nacional de Museos, Perú. He is a Faculty Member of the Afro-Latin American Research Institute at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University, where he is codirecting, with Professor Alejandro de la Fuente, a three-year international seminar, Afro-Latin American Art: Building the Field, funded by a generous Getty Foundation Connecting Art History Grant. Professor Cummins is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Inés Katzenstein joined The Museum of Modern Art in 2018 as Curator of Latin American Art and the inaugural Director of the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Research Institute for the Study of Art from Latin America. In her role as Curator, she helps conceive the Museum's collection displays, and heads the Latin American and Caribbean Fund, which is dedicated to acquisitions from the region. She has organized two major exhibitions based on the Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Gift: Sur moderno: Journeys of Abstraction, in 2018 (with Maria Amalia García) and Chosen Memories, in 2023, and has participated in the curatorial team of Greater New York in 2021. From 2008 to 2018 she was the founding director of the Art Department at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, in Buenos Aires, where she created and oversaw an educational program for artists and curators, as well as an exhibition program. Previously, she was Curator at Malba-Fundación Costantini, and the editor of “Listen, Here, Now, Argentine Art of the Sixties, Writings of the Avant-Garde”, published by The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2004. She holds a master’s degree from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and a BA from the Universidad de Buenos Aires.
Patricio del Real is an architectural historian who works on modern architecture and its transnational connections with cultural institutions, specifically focused in the Americas. Currently an associate professor of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard University, he writes and researches on bilateral relationships between racial and cultural imaginaries, stories and ideologies in the 20th Century. He teaches on the ways in which modernism shaped global political and cultural power in such courses as Making Buildings Beautiful, Architecture and Authoritarianism and Mestizo Nations: Architecture in Mexico and Brazil. His new book: Constructing Latin America: Architecture, Politics, and Race at the Museum of Modern Art analyzes the way architecture exhibitions were mobilized as cultural weapons during the era of pan-Americanism. He's currently working on his next book, which rethinks the concept of utopia in architecture by looking at alternative building and spiritual practices in the 20th Century that developed responses to the universalist mandate of technological modernity, with a particular emphasis on Chile's Valparaiso School of architecture.
Thaisa Way is the Director of the Garden & Landscape Studies and Principal Investigator for the Mellon-funded Initiative, “Democracy and Landscape: Race, Identity, and Difference” at Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, a Harvard University research institution located in Washington DC. She teaches at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University and is Professor Emerita at the College of Built Environments, University of Washington where she was also the founding Director of Urban@UW, an initiative to bring together over 400 scholars to advance knowledge of urban futures. As a landscape historian, Dr. Way was awarded the Rome Prize in Landscape Architecture at the American Academy in Rome in 2016 and as a Resident Scholar in 2023. Her multiple publications (including 6 books) foreground questions of history of the design professions and how gender and race have shaped our landscapes. She holds a PhD in Architectural History and Urbanism from Cornell University and a Master of Architectural History from the University of Virginia.
Presented in collaboration with The Cisneros Institute at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Dumbarton Oaks, the Mellon Urban Initiative at Harvard University and the Harvard Department of History of Art and Architecture