The epidemics that have increasingly punctuated our news feeds in the past years—from cholera to Zika—are fundamentally a spatial problem. Architecture and design are at their center, since contagion and propagation depend on population density and interspecies relationships. The geography of epidemics extends far beyond the scale of the urban, encompassing livestock farms, irrigation basins, palm-oil plantations.
The urbanisation of the planet is thus playing a major role in the development of new infections – yet the only way spatial disciplines are reckoning with disease is through the hollow paradigm of “healthy cities”, which emphasizes individual behaviour over structural causes, and local solutions over public investment.
Andrea Bagnato and Ivan L. Munuera will look at recent and old histories of HIV/AIDS to outline different ways of thinking the relation of disease and space.
Andrea Bagnato is an architect, researcher and book editor. He worked on the books Forensis (Sternberg Press, 2014), SQM: The Quantified Home (Lars Müller Publishers, 2014), and more recently A Moving Border: Alpine Cartographies of Climate Change (Columbia/ZKM, 2019). He is currently head of publications for the first Sharjah Architecture Triennial. Since 2014 he has been working on the long-term project Terra Infecta, a visual archive on the role of infectious diseases in urban and environmental transformations, which has resulted in multiple lectures and publications. Terra Infecta has been supported by Het Nieuwe Instituut and the Graham Foundation.
Ivan L. Munuera is a New York-based scholar, critic, and curator working at the intersection of culture, technology, politics, and bodily practices in the modern period and on the global stage. Since 2015 he is developing his dissertation on the architecture of HIV/AIDS at Princeton University.
His research has been generously sponsored by the PIIRS (Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies) Grant for Winter, and the CCA (Canadian Centre for Architecture) Summer Research Grant. He has presented his work at various academics forums, such as the Association for Art History, Cornell AAP, Columbia GSAPP, Cooper Union, University of Virginia, Princeton University, Sussex University, MICA, and ETSAM among others. His work has been published in Log, Perspecta (upcoming issue 53), The Architect’s Newspaper, and El País, among others. He has curated exhibitions at Museo Reina Sofía (The Schizos, 2009),
Ludwig Museum (ACAX Residency, 2010), Princeton University (Liquid La Habana, 2018), and CA2M (Pop Politics, 2012-2013); and developed a series of broadcasted projects, including Bauhauswelle (Floating University Berlin, 2018), and Chromanoids (Istanbul Design Biennale, 2016; Seoul Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism, 2017)
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