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. A simpel diner by Keju Kitchen and one drink at the bar is included in the ticket price. Doors open and food served from 18:00, the lecture starts at 19:00. You can get tickets for the three lectures altogether or for the individual evenings.

For the first edition of Back to School with...  we've invited architect and researcher Marina Otero Verzier to curate a series around the topic of architecture for data storage and digital infrastructures following the title "Future Storage: Architectures to host the Metaverse."

In this series we will explore architecture paradigms for storing data attuned to socio-ecological challenges and the growing price of energy. We will analyze current trends and innovations in data storing architectures and behaviors that could reduce dependence on data center growth: From macro data centers ceding terrain to decentralized egde computing and micro centers,  to data centres operating as a thermal urban infrastructures, and gardens being models for more-than-human data storing architectures.

With contributions by Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli, Christopher Schlaeffer, Niels Schrader, Jorinde Seijdel and Roel Backaert. More info and tickets here

Marina Otero Verzier is an architect based in Rotterdam and 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.