Columba Livia Domestica

Born from concerns about the relationship between architecture, society, and territory, FIELD collective brings together a multidisciplinary team with diverse and complementary backgrounds, with shared experience in editorial work, curatorial practice, and research projects across the fields of architecture, scenography, art, and design.

For the collective, artistic research and territorial analysis are guided by the intention to operationalize architectural and spatial analysis tools, combining them with anti-extractivist practices and contested territories that confront projects and logics which overlook the temporal and interspecies complexity of cultural and environmental ecosystems.

The collective started as an informal interdisciplinary group of citizens and creative practitioners. Their first official joint effort was the curatorial proposal for the Official Representation for the Portuguese Pavillion at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale, with the project “Reclaim, Repair, Regenerate: Towards a Constellation of Protocols”, which was one of the 3 finalists. The proposal calls to action in response to the multidimensional crisis. It highlighted five forms of extractivism in conflict with civic resistance movements that defend environmental and human values. Through representation and mediation, an open-source protocol manual and a network of mutual cooperation was proposed.

Although the Portuguese Pavillion proposal was not selected, this process gave the opportunity to think about what a national representation could be in complex times, proposing a curatorial vision for a pavilion that would work with local and international citizens movements, articulating and testing alternative futures for spatial, social, and environmental justice.

FIELD recently won the Diogo Seixas Lopes MAC/CCB fellowship with a project called “Columba Livia Domestica: Critical Agent of Decoding Spatial Politics”, that is currently under development.