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Ruin, Desire, Celebration: A talk with Marina Otero Verzier

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Welcome to a presentation and conversation about research and curating spatial practice with Marina Otero Verzier. Introduction and moderation by Magnus Ericson.

In this talk Marina Otero Verzier presents research and curatorial work as an invitation to imagine a different spatial, energetic, and material system, one grounded in desire and interdependence. Through this lens, bodies, architectures, and the planet appear as collective entities engaged in continuous processes of collapse, decomposition, celebration, and co-generation. The talk will draw on Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains, an exhibition at Galería Municipal do Porto created in collaboration with the communities of Covas do Barroso, a landscape of extraordinary biodiversity now facing the threat of lithium extraction. It will also reflect on Opera Aperta, the Holy See Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, which understands repair as a radical and collective gesture of care.

Room in yellow light, with scaffolding and grand piano

Photo: -Credit-Marco-Cremascoli_optPavilion-at-the-Venice-Biennale-2025.-Credit-Marco Cremascoli

Opera Aperta, Holy See Pavilion at the Venice-Biennale 2025.

Compulsive Desires – on Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains takes as its starting point the ongoing lithium extraction plans in the North of Portugal and the struggles sustained by local communities for their lives and rights. It looks at relations between extractivism, productivity and exhaustion and how the “green transition” and development of “renewable energy futures”, often leads to dispossession of communities and degradation of ecosystems. Opera Aperta is set in the historic building Complesso di Santa Maria Ausiliatrice di Castello in Venice, that is currently undergoing restoration. Through its approach engaging diverse forms of labor, knowledge, and embodied experience, bringing together curators, architects, local artisan specialists and community groups it proposes repair as a radical act that extends beyond buildings to care for institutions, communities, ecosystems, and the fragile ties between them.

Marina Otero Verzier is an architect and researcher whose work sits at the intersection of critical spatial practices, ecology, technology, and activism. In 2022, she received Harvard GSD’s Wheelwright Prize for a project on the future of data storage. She is a Lecturer in Architecture at Harvard GSD and Dean’s Visiting Assistant Professor at GSAPP, Columbia University, New York, where she leads the Data Mourning clinic, an educational initiative focused on the intersection of digital infrastructures and climate catastrophe. Otero was Head of the MA Social Design program at Design Academy Eindhoven (2020–2023) and Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut (2015–2022). She has curated exhibitions such as Opera Aperta, awarded a Jury Mention at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025; Wet Dreams at Mayrit, CentroCentro (2024); Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains at Galería Municipal do Porto (2023); Work, Body, Leisure at the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018); and co-curated After Belonging at the Oslo Architecture Triennale (2016). Otero is the author of Flotando en Litio (2025) and En las Profundidades de la Nube (2024). She has also co-edited Automated Landscapes (2023), Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), More-than-Human (2020), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), and Work, Body, Leisure (2018), among others.