Nerea Calvillo: Aeropolis

The atmosphere is a commons. But what if it is polluted? I aim to explore these questions through Aeropolis, a speculative and interdisciplinary framework to reorient common understandings of air and air pollution as matter “out there.” Aeropolis contests regimes of managing air which ultimately operate toward upholding dominant modes of world-making that are dependent on forms of exclusion and inequity. Instead, Aeropolis proposes that air is thought of as a city, to center its social, cultural, political, ecological entanglements. Drawing upon feminist technoscience and queer ecological frameworks, Aeropolis moves away from solutions toward a methodology of “designing-thinking-making” that redirects and connects our understandings of air—as designers, as citizens—with ongoing struggles for just futures. The talk will focus on two spatial design interventions, to unpack the complexities of intervening in different entanglements between air, pollution, repair, preservation and urban space.

Nerea Calvillo (she/they) is an architect-scholar, based at the research Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (University of Warwick, UK), director of spatial design office C+ arquitectas and funder of In the Air, an ongoing collaborative project to sense air(pollution). She works at the intersection between spatial design, feminist technoscience, queer and environmental studies, and her current research is on toxic politics, AI natures, atmospheres and queer urban political ecologies. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Royal Academy of Arts, Canadian Centre for Architecture or the Shanghai Biennale; and published in interdisciplinary journals like Social Studies of Science, Journal of Extreme Events or Public Culture. She is author of Aeropolis: Queering Air in Toxicpolluted Worlds (2023).