Researchers

AA & U for Architecture, Art and Urbanism

Maria Loizidou (www.marialoizidou.com ) is a visual artist, who renews her work’s perspective and enriches it with social and political concerns, by emphasizing “the power of fragility”. She is one of the co-founders of AA & U for Architecture, Art and Urbanism. AA & U focuses on the constructive entanglements between architecture, urban planning and the visual arts to support the urban commons (www.aaplusu.com ). Maria’s collaboration with AA & U allows her to address practices of fragility in a collective and interdisciplinary level.

Secondment destination:
University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria, 2023
The University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2024

University of Cyprus

Socrates Stratis (www.socratestratis.com ) is an urbanist, architect, and activist for the urban commons. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus. He is the co-founder of the critical urban practice agency AA & U, Cyprus, (www.aaplusu.com ). His research focuses on the political agencies of architecture and urban design. Socrates investigates how the strategic and tactful values of urban design, as well as the social dimensions of architecture, inform critical urban practices. He oscillates between diffractive practice and practice-led research, thanks to creative entanglements between teaching, practicing, curating, and writing. His publications include the “Guide to Common Urban Imaginaries in Contested Spaces” (Jovis 2016) and numerous articles available here. His curatorial and activist work includes the Cyprus participation in the 15th Venice Biennale of Architecture, (www.contestedfronts.org ), as well as the “Hands-on Famagusta” project (www.handsonfamagusta.org).

Secondment destinations:
Wonder Cabinet 2023
Transparadiso 2023
Coventry Biennale 2024
Van Abbemuseum 2024

TRANS (transparadiso), Austria

Architect and urbanist, founded transparadiso with the artist Barbara Holub in 1999 as transdisciplinary practice. teaching at the technical university of Vienna; 2018 Österreichischer Kunstpreis, 2007 Otto-Wagner-Award for Urban Design for Salzburg Stadtwerk Lehen; 1994 Tische federal grant at Jean Nouvel’s, Paris; 2001 thesis “contextual acting in architecture and urbanism”, 1997-2003, teaches in differant positions since1997 at University of Technology of Vienna, 2004 Schindler grant, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles,  2004-2006 co-secretary of European Austria, since 2002 member of the editorial board of “dérive – Zeitschrift für Stadtforschung”; 2012 funding by departure for “Direct Urbanism”; 2013 publication “Direct Urbanism”  in Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2018.

Secondment destination:
TBC

Royal College of Art, UK

Marisa Ferreira is an artist and practice based PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London with the project: “Waste Matter. Public Art and the (Im) Materiality of Post-Colonial Memory”. Her research is concerned with ruins created by industrial development in places under extractive colonialism and popular resistance, economic dispute and ecological crisis. Her practice focuses on interdisciplinary artistic expressions in particular sculpture and site-specific projects and draws from material culture, “critical spatial practice” and the idea of waste as an agent for “radical change” in order to explore alternative ways to rethink and reimagine a more inclusive politics of memory, sustainable and emphatic urban policy.

Secondment destination:
TBC

www.marisa-ferreira.com
@marisaferreirastudio

Simon King is a walking artist with a socially engaged practice who teaches at the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins in London. Co-founder with Jaspar Joseph-Lester of the cross-disciplinary project ‘Walkative’ at the RCA in 2013, he has worked collaboratively since 2017 with the artist Corinne Noble to create group walks that have an overarching theme or narrative and a distinctive methodology: the use of literal and metaphorical correspondence through ephemera i.e. antique postcards, found maps, archive photographs, fragments of text, as well as personal recollection and speculation, to prompt engagement and interaction with participant walkers.

Simon is a practice PGR PhD candidate at Birkbeck College (supervised by Professor Esther Leslie), whose research investigates the infrastructures of creative and critical practice in relation to walking, dialogue and social engagement.

Secondment destination:
Florence, Italy – November 2022

thewalkativeproject.org

AHDR/Home for Cooperation, Cyprus

Andri is the Manager of the Home for Cooperation (AHDR/H4C). She holds an MSc in Social and Cultural Anthropology from K.U. Leuven, Belgium, where her thesis focused on reinterpreting the transformation of borders and border-spaces in Nicosia, in their symbolic and literal sense. She holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Surrey, UK, where her research focused on the relationship between the postcolonial state of a country and the notion of hostility in national identities. Her evolving academic interest is to undertake her first steps for an interdisciplinary PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology and Architecture, looking to unpack peacebuilding as a conceptual term, a process and method, in the post conflict context of Cyprus. She is interested to look at the relation of peacebuilding with spatial practices and discursive exchange, and how the multiplicity of stories can affect and enable alternative subjectivities and transformation.

Secondment Destination:
Coventry, UK – 2023

Royal College of Art, UK

Jaspar Joseph-Lester is a London-based artist and Head of MA Sculpture at the Royal College of Art (where he is Reader in Art and Post-Urbanism ). His work explores the role images play in urban planning, social space and everyday praxis. His research interests are situated between art making, curating and writing and draw from the fields of architecture, design, urban studies, human geography, philosophy, cinema and media studies, spatial theory and economics. Here Joseph-Lester has focused on the conflicting ideological frameworks embodied in representations of modernity, urban renewal and regeneration as a means to better understand how art practice can redefine the successive cycle of masterplans and regeneration schemes that determine the cultural life of our cities. Key to this work is the development of platforms and frameworks for art that contribute to developing new ways of thinking social and life experiences for the future.

Secondment destination:
transparadiso, Vienna, Austria
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven NL
A Reserva na Fábrica, Oeiras, Portugal
Kunstverein am Rosa–Luxemburg–Platz, Berlin, Germany

https://www.rca.ac.uk/more/staff/jaspar-joseph-lester/

Royal College of Art, United Kingdom

Carmen Mariscal is a Mexican artist and PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art.

Her cross-disciplinary practice explores traces of memory in dwellings. These include the body, which is humans´ first habitat, followed by their clothes, homes, public spaces and cities. Her recent research also investigates entropy and ruin in Mexican architecture.

Mariscal was awarded first place in the 4th National Installation Contest in Mexico and was selected for the Monterrey Biennial and other competitions. Her public work includes El Pueblo Creador, Expo Hannover 2000, Innata, Luxembourg City and Chez Nous, Place du Palais-Royal, Paris.

She is the author of Nicolás Mariscal, el arquitecto como teórico de arte and was studio art professor at Trinity College, Paris.

Mariscal holds an MA from Winchester School of Art, postgraduate studies at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, and a BA in Art History from Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City.

Secondments Destination TBC

www.carmenmariscal.com

AHDR/Home for Cooperation, Cyprus

Nihal Soganci is currently doing her PhD in Social Anthropology at the Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences in Athens. Her research and work focus on interdisciplinary practices that combine anthropological approaches with contemporary artistic practices. In February 2022, she has published a book chapter called Memories, stories and material traces: Exploring displacement through collaging and participatory art installation. She holds an MSc in International Public Policy from UCL and BA in Languages and Translation from the University of Surrey, UK. She has published and presented her work in various symposiums and conferences and organised collage workshops.

Relating to the SPACEX Project, she is interested in visiting the Royal College of Art in London focusing on how training and education in art and culture can respond to conflict through audience participation and co-production, looking into how it can provide the space to reflect and develop new understandings and methodologies.

Secondment Destination:
Royal College of Art, UK – October 2022

National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland

Emma Mahony’s research is situated in the interstitial spaces between the fields of contemporary art, spatial practice, curatorial studies, radical pedagogy and activism. It focuses on investigating how critical institutionalism and spatial practices can resist and rewrite the neoliberalisation of the public art sector in Europe. Her SPACEX research will examine how thepractices and principles of commoning engendered by marginalised groups, can proactively shape how public cultural institutions deliver and manage their programmes, operational structures, day-to-day activities, collections and archives. She is the Course Leader for the BA in Visual Culture at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin where she also works as a lecturer in the School of Visual Culture. She sits on the editorial board of Art & the Public Sphere journal. From 2004-8 she was Exhibition Curator for Hayward Touring, Southbank Centre, London. She is currently co-editing a Routledge Companion on Spatial Practice and the Urban Commons with Mel Jordan, Andy Hewitt and Socrates Stratis (2025).

Secondment destination:
Van Abbe Museum
Casco

ncad.academia.edu/EmmaMahony
https://www.linkedin.com/in/emma-mahony-648a3616/
https://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/view-journal,id=195/