Torreón Lectures – Saturday
Within the programming of
Libros Mutantes 2023. Madrid Art Book Fair| Target audience: | General public |
| Duration: | 3 hours |
| Location: | Torreón II |
Interactive lecture programme with a focus on publishing projects and the work of designers who discuss the intersection between design, technology and alienation, plus a variety of proposals that combine diverse disciplines like poetry, architecture and code.
7 pm – Cómo librarnos de datos [How To Get Rid of Data], by Marina Otero Verzier
Architect and thinker Marina Otero Verzier, who recently won the Harvard University Wheelwright Prize, comes to Libros Mutantes to give a lecture on the physical architectures that are built all over the world to store data in a supposed cloud that doesn’t actually exist. She will also invite the audience to take part in a data erasure exercise.
Marina Otero Verzier has a PhD in architecture and is the director of the Social Design master’s course at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands. Between 2015 and 2022 she was head of research at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, where she led initiatives focused on work, extraction and mental health from an architectural and post-anthropocentric perspective. Her work as a curator includes the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2018, the Oslo Architecture Triennale in 2016 and the Thirteenth Shanghai Biennale in 2021. Marina was previously the director of Studio-X GSAPP, a global network of research centres focused on the future of cities, attached to Columbia University in New York. She is also the co-editor of books like After Belonging (2016), Work, Body, Leisure (2018), More-than-Human (2020), and Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021).
8 pm – Procedural Typography, by Daniel Wenzel
Procedural Typography is the activity that German designer Daniel Wenzel has conceived and designed for Libros Mutantes. A heavyweight of the contemporary design scene, Wenzel is an art director at Studio DIA in New York and describes himself as a “procedural designer” specialising in typography and generative processes. His aim? To reflect on the autonomy (or not) of creatives in light of the overwhelming automation of processes.
The pandemic caught Wenzel completing his studies in Germany and unable to return to his job in New York, so he decided to work remotely for the studio from Berlin, Istanbul, Athens, Barcelona, Dubrovnik, Split and Bucharest. In March 2021 he started working part-time at the ELISAVA design school in Barcelona, teaching typography for a semester on the Visual Design master´s course. He has since continued his educational work by teaching at universities in Geneva, Mainz, Düsseldorf and The Hague.
Libros Mutantes is sponsored by the Goethe Institut.
