Edén Medina, Hugo Parmarola & Pedro Ignacio Alonso, "Curatorial Strategies in Design: Reconstruction as Performative Practice".
Curatorial work in design is highly interdisciplinary, and often requires bringing expertise together from fields such as architecture, history, design, engineering, and others. It may also involve reconstructing objects and spaces that do not have original examples that can be studied and copied. The main objective of this session is to generate new knowledge through the original and interdisciplinary blending of research and creation, based on innovative curatorship in design. In this workshop students will be able to develop creative curatorial strategies for design; learn about specific cases of design curatorship in contexts with interdisciplinary demands for local and international audiences; study and select historical or contemporary design products of high significance that are absent or unavailable; propose the complete or partial reconstruction or repair of such design objects in order to generate a speculative and performative prototype intended for display.
Artist Biographies:
Hugo Palmarola is associate professor in the School of Design at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He holds a Ph.D. in Latin American studies from Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Palmarola won the 2018 Student Essay Prize from the Design History Society in the United Kingdom for his Ph.D. research. Jointly with Pedro Alonso, he was awarded the 2014 Silver Lion for the ChileanPavilion Monolith Controversies at the Venice Architecture Biennale, and they received the 2014 Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) Book Award for the companion book (Hatje Cantz, 2014). Monolith Controversies is part of the permanent exhibition of the Museo de la Memoria y los Derechos Humanos in Santiago. Along with Alonso, he also published the book Panel (Architectural Association, 2014); curated the exhibition Flying Panels: How Concrete Panels Changed the World at the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design in 2019–2020 in Stockholm; and published a book under the same title (Dom, 2019). In 2008 the Society for the History of Technology named him an international scholar. Together with Alonso, he has been a researcher on projects about the Soviet Pulkovo observatories and NASA satellite stations, both conducted between 2015 and 2021. He contributed texts to the book Extinct: A Compendium of Obsolete Objects (Reaktion Books, 2021).
Eden Medina is associate professor in the Program for Science, Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a historian of science and technology. She is the author of Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011), which won the 2012 Edelstein Prize for best book on the history of technology and the 2012 Computer History Museum Prize for best book on the history of computing. Her coedited volume, Beyond Imported Magic: Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America (MIT Press, 2014), received the Amsterdamska Award from the European Society for the Study of Science and Technology (2016). Her research studies the relationship of science, technology, design and processes of political change. She holds a Ph.D. in the history and social study of science and technology from MIT and a master’s in studies of law from Yale Law School.
Pedro Ignacio Alonso holds a Ph.D. in architecture from the Architectural Association, in London and heads the Ph.D. program in Architecture and Urban Studies at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Alonso was a Princeton-Mellon Fellow at Princeton University in 2015-2016 and Resident Architect at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Centre in Bellagio in 2019. With Hugo Palmarola, he was awarded the 2014 Silver Lion for the Chilean Pavilion Monolith Controversies at the Venice Architecture Biennale. Alonso and Palmarola published Panel (AA Publications, 2014); curated the exhibition Flying Panels: How Concrete Panels Changed the World at the Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design in 2019–2020 in Stockholm; and published a book under the same title (Dom, 2019). Other publications include Cycles: The Architects Who Never Threw Anything Away (Circo de Ideias, 2022) with Pamela Prado; and How to Design a Revolution: The Chilean Road to Design (Lars Muller: 2024) co-edited with Eden Medina and Hugo Palmarola.