High latencies #4
Nerea Calvillo

Nerea Calvillo (b. Madrid, 1973) is an architect, researcher and teacher who works at the intersection of queer political ecology, technoscience and new materialisms. Her research interests include the materiality of air, toxicity as a system, and the politics of data. Her book Aeropolis: Sensing Open Air, Pollution and Queer Political Ecologies has recently been published, and she is co-editor of the special Toxic Politics issue of the Social Studies of Science journal and of the book What Urban Media Art Can Do: Why When Where & How? Nerea Calvillo’s projects have been presented and exhibited internationally at venues such as the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the Royal Academy of Arts, and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Chile. Whether in the form of writing or installations, her research aims to transform the way we think about and imagine nature, and urges us to move towards futures in which we approach air through the lens of social justice rather than purification. 

In this podcast we talk to Nerea Calvillo about data, translations, and citizen science and about pollution, gases, and particles. We spend some time on sensors and infrastructures designed to be invisible, exploring what their data show, and also what they hide. And we think about air and its composition. Nerea also suggests a reading of pollen from a queer theory perspective, challenging its binary classification as either good for the environment or a health threat, and revealing its nature as a material agent that reconfigures the relationships between bodies, cities, and ecologies.

With the support

_{Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.}