10 May 2025 Urgent Pedagogies: Practicing Care
CATEGORY
On the occasion of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025, IASPIS welcomes you to a series of presentations and a conversation exploring different approaches and environments for practicing care pedagogies concerning overlapping crises.
In this gathering of Urgent Pedagogies, architects and academics unfold their socially engaged critical practice, operating between institutional and non-institutional pedagogical and activist environments. Examples of projects and platforms dealing with urgent issues of social and environmental justice, dispositions of non-conforming bodies, and the right to public space.
With Malkit Shoshan, Socrates Stratis, Anna Puigjaner, and Ethel Baraona Pohl, response by Silvia Franceschini, introduction and moderation by Pelin Tan and Magnus Ericson.
Pre-registration only, limited availability
Please send an email to: urgentpedagogies@iaspis.se
Practices of Care. Photo by Socrates Stratis
In times of uncertainty and overlapping crises, an infrastructure of care offers a framework for cultivating nurturing relationships – both between people and with our shared planet – through collective action. In her presentation, Malkit Shoshan explores projects by the think tank FAST, with diverse stakeholders in border regions, from working with local communities to global institutions. Including the use of design to imagine and cultivate care infrastructure where they are needed the most. Today, centring care becomes a radical act of collective remediation, inextricably linking our well-being to the well-being of others and our planet. Anna Puigjaner and Ethel Baraona Pohl discuss the research and educational project Care. that addresses care and architecture. The project was launched in 2023 as the Chair of Architecture and Care in the Department of Architecture at ETH Zürich, in which Care. aims to rethink the built environment at multiple scales to foster non-conforming ways of living and joy, from a gender, queer and crip perspective. Dismantling care regimes based on unevenly distributed and often invisibilised care labour, an architecture that acknowledges the multiplicity of body dispositions in social space, from ageing to neurodivergence, from gender to race, is promoted. Socrates Stratis presents the project Practices of Care that involve his double agency of being both an infrastructural designer of public spaces and an activist for the urban commons in Cyprus. Rather often, public spaces in ethno-nationally driven urban environments host the dominating collective memory of those in power: monuments of heroes, in their majority of men, and objects for commemoration of relevant historical events. Practices of Care are about techniques of camouflage in introducing alternative narratives that don’t abide by the dominant.
is a curator, researcher and writer. Currently, she holds the position of curator of the contemporary at CIVA, in Brussels, which soon will transform into a new idea of an art center at Kanal Pompidou. She is also a collaborator of Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto, where she is part of the faculty of the master’s in design, Creativity and Social Practices. Silvia Franceschini has published extensively on topics of comparative modernities, critical pedagogies and alternative institutional making. She holds a PhD in Design and Visual Culture from the Polytechnic University of Milan. In her thesis Toward an Ecology of Knowledges: Critical Pedagogy and Epistemic Disobedience in Contemporary Visual Art and Design Practices, she explores and discusses in depth historical and contemporary theory and practice in this field.
is a designer, researcher, and writer, as well as the founding director of the architectural think tank FAST: Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory. FAST operates at the intersection of architecture, urban planning, and human rights. Its interdisciplinary practice utilizes research, advocacy, and socially engaged art and design to make visible systemic violence and promote social and environmental justice through collaborative initiatives and designs. Malkit Shoshan is the 2024 Senior Loeb Scholar at Harvard Graduate School of Design and a 2024 Rockefeller Bellagio Center Resident. In 2021, she received the Silver Lion at the Venice Architecture Biennale for her collaborative project “Border Ecologies and the Gaza Strip: Watermelon, Sardines, Crabs, Sand, and Sediment.”
is a PhD architect and researcher, co-founder of MAIO, an architectural office based in Barcelona. Her work, linked to feminist studies, is focused on inclusive domestic architectures able to redefine former biased structures. She is currently Professor of Architecture and Care at ETH Zürich. Previously, she taught at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation GSAPP at Columbia University, at the Royal College of Arts, London, and at the Barcelona School of Architecture ETSAB/ETSAV – UPC. Anna Puigjaner has presented her work widely, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Venice Biennale, and the New York Museum of Modern Art. Her research project, Kitchenless City was awarded the Wheelwright Prize (2016) by the Harvard Graduate School of Design. MAIO is also part of the team (along with Marina Otero Verzier, Giovanna Zabotti, and Tatiana Bilbao Estudio) of the Holy See Pavilion, titled Opera Aperta, at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, 2025.
is a critic, writer and curator, as well as a co-founder of the independent research studio and publishing house dpr-barcelona, which operates in the fields of architecture, political theory, and the social milieu. Their curatorial practice includes, among others, “Twelve Cautionary Urban Tales” (Matadero Madrid, 2020–21); and more recently, “Llibres Model” a curated book collection and open library (Model, Barcelona Architectures Festival 2022, 2023). Ethel is Senior Researcher at the Chair of Architecture and Care (Care.) in the Department of Architecture ETH Zürich. Their writing has been widely published, both in academic and independent publications. Ethel believes that publishing is a political act, and reading, a form of resistance.
Previously, he was the Director of the Urban Studies and Spatial Practices program at Al Quds Bard College for Arts and Sciences, in Abu Dis in Palestine. Emilio has taught architecture at the Metropolitan University in London and politics at SOAS. He collaborates with DAAR – Decolonizing Architecture Art Research and RIWAQ-Centre for Architectural Conservation in Palestine.
is an urbanist, architect, and activist for the urban commons. He is a Professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus, co-founder of the critical urban practice agency AA & U, Cyprus, and director of LUCY (Laboratory of Urbanism, University of Cyprus). His work focuses on the political and social agencies of architecture and urban design. Socrates Stratis is a member of the Scientific Committee of Europan Europe and part of the coordination team for the Horizon 2020, Research Project on Spatial Practices for Empathetic Exchange in the City. He recently published Urban Design on the Move: Five Stories for Implementing a Winning Europan Project (Berlin, jovis, 2024).
is a sociologist/art historian, Professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts, and Head of Film Department, Batman University, Türkiye. She is a member of Arazi Assembly, Mardin, and Artıkİşler video collective. 6th Recipient of Keith Haring Art & Activism (NYC, 2019). Roemer Fellow of the Orient Institute of Beirut, Lebanon (2024). She curated GardenUtopia, Matera EEC (2018 – 2020), Retrospective of D.F. Faustino, MAAT, Lisbon (2023-2024), State of Displacement – Entangled Topographies, 17th Istanbul Biennial (2022). Co-director with artist Anton Vidokle of several films, including Gılgamesh: Who She Saw the Deep / Gilgamêş: Ewe ku kûrahî dît (2023). Landscapes as Archives (2024). Book: Forms of Non-Belonging (e-flux books, Sternberg Press/MIT Press, 2025). Pelin Tan is together with Magnus Ericson, co-curator of the IASPIS project Urgent Pedagogies.
is a Stockholm-based curator and educator working across design, architecture, urbanism, and art. He is currently Head of IASPIS Applied Arts, leading the program related to design, crafts, architecture, spatial and urban practice. He has, over the years, in different institutional settings and as an independent curator, combined curatorial and pedagogical practice with an emphasis on socially engaged critical practice, alternative pedagogies, and organising spaces for learning. He was Senior Advisor/Curator for the at Arkdes, Sweden’s National Center for Architecture and Design (2009–14). Together with Ramia Maze, he was the author and co-editor of DESIGN ACT Socially and politically engaged design today – critical roles and emerging tactics (Berlin, Sternberg Press, 2011). Together with Pelin Tan, he is co-curator of the IASPIS project Urgent Pedagogies.
