Activating the Alternatives

Expanding upon the themes addressed in Accumulation by Dispossession, her current Delfina Foundation exhibition, Asunción Molinos Gordo will be in conversation with Miguel Robles-Durán. Their discussion will focus in particular on the project CENEDET (The National Strategy Centre for the Right to Territory), an autonomous research group based in Quito, Ecuador which Robles-Durán founded in 2013 with Professor David Harvey. CENEDET seeks to open spaces for reflection, criticism and debate on the socio-spatial transformations of the Ecuadorian territory. Through on research on the uneven geographical development and the production of space from the historical-geographical materialism approach, the project endeavours to advance radical strategies of social change, based on the principles of socio-ecological justice and the right to territory.

This talk is part of a series of public events in Delfina Foundation’s fourth season of the thematic programme The Politics of Food. Subtitled Adapting, this latest iteration investigates ideas responding to the changing environment of food production.

Participant Biographies

Miguel Robles-Durán is Associate Professor of Urbanism at The New School/Parsons School of Design in New York City. In 2008, Robles-Durán co-founded Cohabitation Strategies (CohStra), an international nonprofit cooperative for socio-spatial research and development based in Rotterdam and New York City, which focuses on conditions of urban decline, inequality and segregation within the contemporary city. CohStra has developed and designed over a dozen transdisciplinary urban projects in Europe, Asia, North and South America bringing different methodologies to acquire a comprehensive understanding of the agents affecting urban areas and structuring trans-disciplinary working frameworks and processes to catalyse grassroots led transformations, CohStra’s community-driven projects have been featured in the Museum of Modern Art, Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Istanbul Design Biennial, and the Shenzhen Biennial. Parallel to his work with CohStra, Robles-Durán’s direct engagement with urban social movements and institutions has led him to become acting Judge at the International Tribunal of Evictions, advisor to The Right to the City Alliance, the International Alliance of Inhabitants, and co-directed CENEDET with the Marxist geographer David Harvey in the Republic of Ecuador.

Event supporters

Arts Council England and Acción Cultural Española

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