Back to School with... is a sequence of research based lectures where we invite notable people that woke our interest and curiosity and from whom we want to learn more. For each series of three evenings, we ask a professional guest to design and curate a lectures programme around one topic or question that is on their mind at that moment.

Chapter #1
Marina Otero Verzier

18 October, 08 November and 22 November 2022. More info soon

For the first edition of Back to School with...  we've invited Marina Otero Verzier as our curator. Marina is an architect based in Rotterdam. She is Head of the Social Design Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven. From 2015-2022 she was the Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut (HNI), the Dutch institute for Architecture, Design and Digital Culture. At HNI she led initiatives such as “Automated Landscapes”, focusing on the emerging architectures of automated labour, and “BURN-OUT: Exhaustion on a planetary scale”, instigating forms of care for multispecies, collective bodies.

Otero has been a co-curator at the Shanghai Art Biennial 2021, curator of the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018, and chief curator of the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale. She has co-edited Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021) More-than-Human (2020), Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series (2016-20), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), Work, Body, Leisure (2018), and After Belonging (2016), among others.

Recently she won the prestigious GSD Wheelwright Prize with her proposal “Future Storage: Architectures to Host the Metaverse,” examining new architecture paradigms for storing data and how reimagining digital infrastructures could meet the unprecedented demands facing the world today.

For Back to School with... we invite Professionals, makers and (critical) thinkers from inside and outside the field of architecture and urban design to share their most current thoughts, recent questions and latest or ongoing research. For each series we ask a professional guest to design and curate a lecture programme around one topic or question that has their urgent and great interest at this moment and to bring together different speakers to elaborate on the subject in three consecutive evening events.

This program pursues no greater ambition than to stimulate and provide space to exchange and commonly learn about latest research topics from other professionals and build up new knowledge for everyone who shares our curiosity.