Nerea Calvillo ist Poiesis-Fellow der BMW Stiftung. 1999 erwarb sie ihren Abschluss als Architektin an der Madrider Architekturhochschule ETSAM. Im selben Jahr erhielt sie ein Fulbright-Stipendium für ein Master-Studium an der Columbia University. Sie war für verschiedene Firmen tätig, darunter NO.MAD (Madrid, 1999-2001) und FOA (London, 2001-2003). Im Jahr 2004 gründete sie ihr eigenes Architekturbüro, C+, das seitdem mehrere nationale und internationale Wettbewerbe gewonnen hat. Ihre Arbeiten und Artikel wurden in Architekturzeitschriften und allgemeinen Medien veröffentlicht. Ihr Schwerpunkt liegt auf den neuen Technologien als Design-Tools, und ihre Forschungsprojekte zu Datenvisualisierung und Kartografien werden an internationalen Universitäten und Zentren für neue Technologien entwickelt, darunter ihr jüngstes Projekt „In the Air“: Unsichtbare Städte werden durch kollaborative Prozesse und multidisziplinäre Teams sichtbar gemacht, indem die Verhaltensmuster des vorhandenen urbanen Umfelds mit allen Sinnen erfasst, beschrieben, beeinflusst und verändert werden. Sie ist Design Studio Professor an der Universidad Europea de Madrid und aktuell Kuratorin des Media(nera)Lab, der Forschungssparte des Medialab-Prado in Madrid.

Nerea Calvillo. the Poiesis Fellowship targets leading scholars and practitioners who are interested in shaping this interdisciplinary dialogue on an advanced academic level on various dimensions of the topic "Design, Power and the Unanticipated in Social Change." What are your expectations and what are your contributions to this project?

The Poiesis Fellowship project is an amazing opportunity to build an interdisciplinary and international research group working together at various scales and through different approaches around the contemporary topic "Design, Power and the Unanticipated in Social Change.". It would be quite exciting fo be able to find specific objects or subjects as key studies, and whose result could contribute to the general academic debate. However, as was discussed in our first meeting, maybe there is no need of having an enclosed and identifiable output at the end of the process. Maybe what can become a topic of research on it´s own is the methodology of collaborative research we construct along the way. It would be a great goal to learn from each other (Mentors and all participants included), to merge ideas instead of adding them, to cross groups and researches and infect our personal investigations.
As my personal contribution to the group I could say that my background in architecture and my previous projects about ways of looking at the city has demonstrated to share many common interests with other members of the group. Also, my experience in collaborative research and production could inform our collective working processes.

During their first meeting, the Poiesis members focused on the city as research object. They understand the city to be a microcosm where social differences, technology, new collaboration strategies, and new conflicts all come together. What is the challenge of the global cities in the future? And where are the solutions?

Cities are ever growing ecosystems, not only for the increasing amount of inhabitants and colonized area, but also for the growing complexity of the interaction of the processes that take place in them. At the same time their relationship with their environment is everyday getting worse (although it has been historically never one of it´s best characteristics). From this point of view could be said that their challenge would be, as for any ecosystem, to find an equilibrium in their growth and a sustainable relationship with their environment. This would imply proper conditions for human flows, money and energy, social stability, equilibrium with the rural, sustainable interactions with nature and the built, etc.

But as history has also proved, there are no general solutions to be implemented. The performance of the city can change with the combination of local and global policies, always adapted or emerged from social, cultural and historical local procedures. However, it would be interesting to identify who is designing or implementing those policies: are they the States? Multi-State associations? Corporations? Citizens? And which is their success or effectiveness in producing changes? It may be naive, but eventually the empowerment of citizens may be a tool for political action and urban change.

The Fellowship offers an opportunity for young scholars, artists, architects, engineers and representatives of other professional disciplines to join in building collaborative relationships on an international scale at an early stage of their careers. As an architect, what could be the biggest benefit of this cooperation?

Although urbanism has for some years now opened it´s discussion to other fields of knowledge, urban design is still in many locations territory of architects who look at the city as a built object, and this is how it is practiced and taught. It is from this perspective that the opportunity of having such an interdisciplinary and open group of work could become a prototype for other experiences, in which all references are developed and discussed not only in theory, but through design.

Your recent project In the Air is a visualization project which aims to make visible the microscopic and invisible agents of Madrid´s air (gases, particles, pollen, diseases, etc), to see how they perform, react and interact with the rest of the city. Can you tell us more about the background of this outstanding project?

Within every ecosystem there are always invisible agents that are affecting and participating as any other agents in the performance of the system. Their invisibility has certain potentials when it is wanted, but can have many disadvantages when it is not. Then, the discovery of these limits and the understanding of the intricacies of their behavior can become an interesting and effective tool for data collecting, inclusion and political action.

In the Air is part of a series of projects in which we tried to work with invisible urban elements, questioning why are they invisible, who has rendered them in that way, and whether they need to become visible and how, for whom and when. Part of these invisible agents were citizens that had been for various reasons excluded from the social fabric, others were economical covered transactions in critical neighborhoods etc.

But there are also other elements which have been excluded from urban (and architectonic) design, such as the non-humans, as users and actors of our daily lives. We realized that some of these non-human elements are invisible because they are microscopic, and that they are part of an area of the city which is never taken into account because it is also invisible (not always, unfortunately), as it is the urban air, but knowing at the same time that it is an indicator of many parameters of the urban life, such as traffic, weather conditions, holidays, etc.
In this context In the Air was born, and it´s aim is not only to make visible the components of the air, but also their legal regulations, the social actions that can enhance, the devices that can become public infrastructures to monitorize and share them, etc...

"Social cohesion" is the superordinate topic not only of the Poiesis Fellowship, but also of the work of the BMW Foundation. What can we do to strengthen the cohesion of societies and what are - in your opinion - the biggest threats?

Societies are built up by individuals, collectives and many other types of formal or informal associations, where each of them has its needs, identities and desires. Social cohesion could be the tool to guarantee their capacity to negotiate their space and their differences, and to allow for different common subjectivity to cohabit. But, which are the strategies which strengthen that cohesion without homogenization or exclusion?
One path could be to find common interests between groups at many different scales, so that they engage with common issues or problems and get together to work whith them. In this context, sustainable topics are starting to become in many countries elements of social cohesion where the common interest, although politicized (as everything else), can become at least a common base for discussion and interaction. This social cohesion could eventually lead to the social design of the habitat where new practices can emerge as bodily and subjective habits, as new territories for a common and multiple subjectivity.

 

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