Nerea Calvillo
Nerea Calvillo explores the material, technological, political, and social dimensions of environmental pollution, at the intersections between architecture, feminist studies of technoscience, new materialisms and urban ecological policies. She is presently working on toxicity and politics, pollen, and queer urban political ecology, as she completed her manuscript for Aeropolis: Sensing Open Air, Pollution and Queer Political Ecologies.
She is Associate Professor at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies, University of Warwick, and adjunct assistant professor in the Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design, Columbia University, New York. She co-founded C+ arquitectas and In the Air, a joint research project looking into environmental mediations. Her work has been presented and exhibited in international venues such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Royal Academy of Arts, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Chile. She is co-editor of the special edition of Toxic Politics (Social Studies of Science, 2018) and also of the book What Urban Media Art Can Do – Why When Where & How? (av edition, 2016).
How can we know about the environments that refuse being sensed? About environments sensed through bodies in pain? How can we recognize what we/it is sensing? Is sensing a mediation, and if so, can it be environmental? These questions are addressed through Aeropolis, a conceptual, methodological and discursive framework to think about air and its pollution as material, situated, embodied and socio-technical assemblages. As a transfeminist project, Aeropolis embraces the multiplicity of ways in which the air and its pollution are conceptualized, suffered and dealt with. In particular, the presentation unpacks different ways of air sensing, from institutional monitoring networks, to DIY citizen science projects to physical perceptions of pollution, to identify what counts as evidence in toxic regimes, who does the sensing and what exactly is being sensed. As a design and political project, Aeropolis aims to multiply the spaces of intervention through Environmental Mediations, experimental artifacts to sense differently in and within our polluted worlds.