Studio grant holder in Stockholm August – October 2019

Mauricio Corbalan is an architect and urbanist living and working in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He studied Architecture and Urbanism at the FADU-UBA. From 1999 till 2004 he was member of “m777” an architect’s collective and since 2005 he is codirector- together with Pio Torroja- of m7red, an independent research and activist group focused on building tools and methodologies for the description of complex scenarios. From 2009 to 2014, m7red took part in “GarageLab”, a hackerspace delivering open data platforms to tackle Buenos Aires worst environmental issue: the polluted Matanzas Riachuelo river basin. Currently m7red is working, together with Forensic Architecture, on the spatial consequences of the Sandra’s case, the first captive orangutan granted non-human rights at the Buenos Aires Zoo, and in establishing a laboratory for territorial technologies inside an excluded workers union in the Buenos Aires area.

The practice of m7red could be sum up in how cities and territories are nowadays reorganized by data, gender and species. These categories are effectively reorganizing cities instead of those that emerged shaped public space during the age of modernism. The merging of ethics and design, the crisis of scientific knowledge and the raising of the metadata society have radically altered the way of understanding complex urban phenomena. M7red has also developed projects and collaborations with Jeanne van Heeswijk, Raumlabor – Berlin, Estudio Teddy Cruz, Transit Labour, Tomas Saraceno and Forensic Architecture. Its works has been exhibited at the Mercosul Biennale in Porto Alegre, Brazil, The APAP project 2010 in Seoul and the 3d. Design Biennale at Istanbul.

“We are currently exploring some of these issues when figuring out the spatial consequences of granting rights to animals or doing forensics of crimes against nature together with affected stakeholders. From the convergence of the made and the born to the collusion of the digital and the ecological, these scenarios share common features: uncertainty, risk and future. Our practice consists to describe and forecast how these scenarios evolve by means of information philosophy, ethnography and postnormal science. As these scenarios are performative, they become operational fields from which new ways of knowledge could emerge and collective capacities of action could be built.”

“My plan for the IASPIS residence is to explore how certain urban environments are being reorganized by means of data, gender and species by taking specific related scenarios of Buenos Aires and Stockholm. I will do this by conceptualizing trends and mapping them out through diagrams, interviews, reports and informal talks that will be part of the content of a forthcoming book on the issue. I will try to develop this by collaborations with fellow researchers around Stockholm that are focused on these issues but also by getting in contact with local activists.”