Alfonse Chiu / Emma Kaufmann LaDuc

Alfonse Chiu is a researcher and curator. Their research interests lie broadly in interrogating imaginaries of capital and ideologies as shaped by media infrastructures and networked economies, so as to contemplate possible futures for bodies, societies, and the environment. They are the founder of the Centre for Urban Mythologies (CUM), a critical platform exploring the tropes and narratives of the urban condition to propose larger situated critiques of capitalism and Anthropocene positioned from the Global South. Their texts have been commissioned and published internationally by institutions such as the Asian Film Archive, Berlinale, Sharjah Architecture Triennial, and Nieuwe Instituut. They have participated in residencies at Medialab Matadero, PACT Zollverein, and Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb. They were the Fall 2021 e-flux journal fellow, the 2021/22 DECK Associate Curator, and a winner of the Young Climate Prize 2023, organised by The World Around. They are presently a master’s candidate in environmental design at the Yale School of Architecture.

Emma Kaufmann LaDuc is an architect and landscape architect currently working as a researcher at the Chair of Affective Architectures, ETH Zürich. Her research seeks to both pluralize and localise spatial practice, thinking through resilient systems and acting through collaborative interventions. She has hosted workshops at the Universität für angewandte Kunst, Vienna Design Week, and the international conference ‘Archipelago: Architectures of the Multiverse’, and has given talks at the University of Oxford and Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. Since 2022, she runs an experimental unit on landscape at the AA Summer School in London, as well as collaborates with the interdisciplinary collective La Rivoluzione delle Seppie, where she participated in “Belmondo Tracks”, exhibited at the Venice Biennale for Architecture 2023.