The CCA Research Network Summer Kick-Off Lecture, Spatial Justice between Wetland Communities and Data Infrastructure in Quilicura, Santiago de Chile, marks the opening of the summer research season at the CCA by welcoming the recipients of the 2023 Architecture as Public Concern Fellowship to share the work they have been doing. Join Serena Dambrosio (Doctoral Research Residency Program 2019), Nicolas Diaz, and Marina Otero (Research Fellowship Program 2022) as they explore what it means to create meaningful, environmentally sensitive, and in-depth forms of community consultation in Quilicura. On the outskirts of Santiago de Chile, Quilicura is a neighbourhood in which wetlands and data centre development are increasingly at odds. Undertaken in the context of a design studio and workshop, “Wetland Enmeshments: Water, Cables, and Data in Quilicura” that took place in January 2024, Dambrosio, Diaz, and Otero reflect on how to create methods of consultation that can highlight community-level concerns of water scarcity and pollution, while also not losing sight of the pressures imposed by governing bodies grappling with the rapid emergence of Artificial Intelligence and its associated infrastructural demands, including the construction of data centres.

The event will open with Dambrosio, Diaz, and Otero sharing their research project, followed by a conversation moderated by CCA Research Network Steering Committee Members Arièle Dionne-Krosnick, Georgios Eftaxiopoulos, Nokubekezela Mchunu, Sara Stevens, and Huda Tayob. Mél Hogan (Queen’s University) will participate to the conversation as a respondent.

The CCA Research Network, an entity that brings together alumni from almost four decades of research programs at the CCA, was formally launched in 2023. Participants in any of our Research programs since the CCA was founded are automatically enrolled. In September, 2023, we shared the first annual Architecture as Public Concern Lecture and we also announced the recipients of our inaugural Architecture as Public Concern Fellowship, which asked “Who is the Work For?”

Register for the Zoom link here.

Serena Dambrosio is an architect and researcher based in Chile. She is currently a young researcher and coordinator of the Núcleo Milenio Future of Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) and adjunct professor at the UC School of Architecture and the UNAB School of Architecture. Dambrosio received her PhD in Architecture and Urban Studies from the Universidad Católica de Chile in 2023 with her dissertation “Tabula Rasa: The Rhetoric of the City as Laboratory”. She has led projects that cross research, curatorship, and teaching such as “Humedales Enmarañados: agua, cables y datos en Quilicura” (2024) together with Nicolas Díaz and Marina Otero, “Pasados/Futuros” (2019-) together with Constanza Larach. Dambrosio has published articles such as “A Land or a Ruin: Contested Vulnerability” (2021) and is co-author of Part-Time Cities (2019). She has also participated in self-organized groups to question conventional spaces of learning and knowledge production in art and architecture, including “Assembramenti” (IT), “La escuela nunca” (CH), “Por un habitar digno” (CH).

Nicolas Diaz is currently a doctoral student of the Architecture and Urban Studies programme at PUC, doctoral thesis student of the Núcleo Milenio Future of Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) and instructor professor at the UC School of Architecture. He has worked as an architect and consultant in data centre projects and educational and professional environments both in Colombia and Chile. In 2021 he published “Arquitectura para objetos” (Architecture for Objects) (RITA).

Marina Otero Verzier is an architect and researcher. In 2022, she received Harvard’s Wheelwright Prize for a project on the future of data storage and was a CCA Research Fellow. Otero served as the director of the Master’s program in Social Design at the Design Academy Eindhoven from 2020 to 2023 and was the research director at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam from 2015 to 2020. Previously, she directed Studio-X Programming at Columbia University’s GSAPP. Otero has curated several exhibitions, including “Wet Dreams” at CentroCentro in Madrid (2024); “Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Mining and Rebellious Mountains” at the Galería Municipal do Porto (2023); and “Work, Body, Leisure” at the Dutch Pavilion during the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018). She co-curated “After Belonging” with the After Belonging Agency at the Oslo Architecture Biennale (2016) and, alongside You Mi, Lucia Pietroiusti, and Filipa Ramos, “Bodies of Water” at the Shanghai Art Biennale 2022, directed by Andrés Jaque. Otero is the author of En las profundidades de la nube (2024) and has co-edited several books, including Automated Landscapes (2023), Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), More-than-Human (2020), and Architecture of Appropriation (2019).

“Wetland Enmeshments” has been made possible thanks to the collaboration of Resistencia Socioambiental Quilicura (Alexandra Arancibia, Vicente Bardales, Rodrigo Vallejos), Corporación Ngen (Miguel Mora, Lorena Antiman) and the support of Future of Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR), the Master of Architecture of the Universidad Catolica (MARQ UC) and the “Congreso Futuro”.