• Summer School As School 2017
Marina Otero: Constructing institutional memory
Marina Otero at Summer School as School 2017
Saturday, 22 July, 2017, 19:00
Venue: Boxing Club, Mark Isaku Str. 10000 Prishtina, Republic of Kosovo

Stacion - Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina is pleased to introduce the presentation of Marina Otero, part of the Public Program of Summer School as School 2017.

Constructing institutional memory: on the inclusion of non-author-based, precarious, and criminalized spatial practices in the museum

The squatting movement has played a major role in the design of the urban fabric and the domestic interior, and proposed alternatives to the dominant, market-oriented housing policies. To acknowledge their legacy as well as its contemporary relevance, Het Nieuwe Instituut is conducting a collective research into squatting as an architectural practice: Architecture of Appropriation. Bringing together the expertise of the squatter movement with that of architects, archivists, scholars, lawyers, and policy makers, this research project forms the basis for a new acquisition policy for the State Archive for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning.
In this lecture, we will discuss new approaches to the representation of precarious, and often criminalized spatial practices within the institutional framework of a museum and its operating platforms, while acknowledging the fragility of these communities and the need to carefully limit the processes of institutional appropriation. Taking as a departure point the case of Architecture of Appropriation, we will examine the role that museums could have in the construction of the history of the city and its inhabitants.

Marina Otero Verzier is an architect based in Rotterdam. She is Head of Research and Development at Het Nieuwe Instituut. Previously she was based in New York, where she was Director of Global Network Programming at Studio-X, a global network of research laboratories for exploring the future of the built environment, which was launched by the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in 2008. She was Adjunct Assistant Professor at the same institution.
Otero studied architecture at TU Delft and ETSA Madrid, where she completed her PhD in 2016. Her thesis 'Evanescent Institutions' examined the emergence of a new paradigms for cultural institutions. In 2013, as a Fulbright Scholar, she graduated from the M.S. in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia University GSAPP.

Her work, recently awarded by The Graham Foundation and Fundación Arquia, has been published in different books and journals. Otero has co-edited Promiscuous Encounters (GSAPP Books, 2014), Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series (Dpr-Barcelona, 2016), After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay In Transit (Lars Müller Publishers, 2016). She was Chief Curator of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016 with the After Belonging Agency. She also co-curated exhibitions at the 2013 Shenzhen Bi-city Biennale and the 2014 Istanbul Design Bienniale.

Otero has taught seminars and studios at ETSAM, Barnard College, and Columbia GSAPP, and lectured at a number of universities around the world, including AA London, AHO, EPS Alicante, ETSAM, GSAPP, Harvard GSD, and Ryerson University.

Full schedule of The Public Program of Summer School as School 2017 can be found at: http://www.stacion.org/en/Public-Lectures-and-Presentations-2017

Stacion – Center for Contemporary Art Prishtina and partner institutions with Summer School as School have created a unique international educational platform, based in Prishtina, as a progressing model; developing an interdisciplinary curriculum and engaging practitioners from the region and beyond in sharing knowledge and expertise with international students and the public.

The project’s larger context responds to the art education systems of Kosovo, Macedonia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia.

Summer School as School 2017 is organized in cooperation with Allianz Cultural Foundation, supported by ERSTE Foundation, Trust for Mutual Understanding(TMU), Federal Chancellory of Austria, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung office in Prishtina, Ministry of Diaspora of the Republic of Kosovo, Municipality of Prishtina, Independent Curators International (ICI), The Office for Contemporary Art (OCA), Norway and RIT Kosovo. Complete list of donors and cooperation partners will be announced in due time.