Nerea Calvillo guest talk on “Environmental Mediations"

Welcome to a guest talk by architect and researcher, Dr Nerea Calvillo (University of Warwick). Calvillo’s talk on “Environmental Mediations, Sensing Aeropolis” is co-hosted by the Design and Aesthetics for Environmental Data project (Aarhus University) and the Aarhus School of Architecture, in addition to support from the Humans and IT research program (Aarhus University). The talk is part of our on-going collaboration with the colleagues in architecture on questions of space, sensing, and ecologies of design. Please find below the abstract for the talk. All welcome! 

For further information and queries, please contact professor Jussi Parikka (parikka@cc.au.dk).

Nerea Calvillo: Environmental Mediations, Sensing Aeropolis

 How can we know about the environments that refuse being sensed? About environments sensed through bodies in pain? How can we recognize what we/it is sensing? Is sensing a mediation, and if so, can it be environmental? These questions are addressed through Aeropolis, a conceptual, methodological and discursive framework to think about air and its pollution as material, situated, embodied and socio-technical assemblages. As a transfeminist project, Aeropolis embraces the multiplicity of ways in which the air and its pollution are conceptualized, suffered and dealt with. In particular, the presentation unpacks different ways of air sensing, from institutional monitoring networks, to DIY citizen science projects to physical perceptions of pollution, to identify what counts as evidence in toxic regimes, who does the sensing and what exactly is being sensed. As a design and political project, Aeropolis aims to multiply the spaces of intervention through Environmental Mediations, experimental artifacts to sense differently in and within our polluted worlds.

Nerea Calvillo is an associate professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (University of Warwick). Her research explores the material, technological, political and social dimensions of environmental pollution at the intersection between architecture, feminist studies of technoscience, new materialisms and queer political ecologies. Calvillo established the architecture firm, C+arquitectas, based in Madrid and London, and initiated in 2008 the collaborative research project In the Air, to explore different forms of sensing air pollution. Her work has been published and exhibited in international venues, like the Royal Academy of Arts (UK) Canadian Centre for Architecture (CA), Laboral Centro de Arte y Produccion Industrial (SP) or the Contemporary Art Museum of Santiago de Chile (CH). Currently Calvillo is working on the manuscript of Aeropolis: Queering air in toxicpolluted worlds.