Keynote speakers and Parallel events

Enlace: arquitectura / Enlace: foundation

Meaning “link” in Spanish, enlace embodies an ethos of participatory engagement with communities through design. Projects operate through an interdisciplinary approach that rejects the prescriptive process of formalist architecture. Founded in 2007 by architect Elisa Silva, enlace combines research, design and collaboration with local cultural organizations and activists to raise awareness of urban spatial inequalities shaped by socioeconomic forces and environmental pressures. enlace is a practice borne from observations and dialogues with a multitude of voices that facilitates experiences of social integration through encounters, music, art, and design as points of exchange between disperate groups.

enlace: arquitectura (est. 2007) is a professional practice invested in extending the tools of architecture, landscape architecture and urban design to territories beyond the discipline's conventional boundaries.

enlace: foundation (est. 2017) is a non-government organization that engages participatory design processes and cultural programs to build awareness of pressing social and environmental issues.

Website

About Elisa Silva

Founder and principal of Enlace Arquitectura and Enlace Foundation. She has a Master of Architecture degree from the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University in Boston and a bachelor’s degree from Emory University in Atlanta. Elisa has received several awards and fellowships including the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome 2005, the Wheelwright Fellowship from Harvard University 2011, Graham Foundation Grant in 2017 and 2021 and the Lucas Artist Fellowship in 2019. She is Associate Professor at the Wolfsonian Public Humanity Lab and the Dept. of Architecture at FIU and was previously Assistant Visiting Professor at Princeton University, Sessional Lecturer at the University of Toronto, Design Critic in Landscape Architecture at Harvard GSD, and Assistant Professor at Simon Bolivar University and the Central University in Venezuela. She is interested in contemporary art, music, literature, languages, running and swimming. She is a registered architect in the state of Florida USA and in Venezuela and is a LEED Accredited Professional. Elisa grew up between Venezuela and St. Louis Missouri, USA.

Raumlaborberlin

Architecture is an experimental laboratory for a moment related to the participatory work practice in urban areas. Architecture is understood not as an object, but rather as history, a layer of the history of the place. As architects, artist we are more of activists, because we operate within the city. Architecture is a tool, in the search for a city of possibilities, the city of tomorrow!

Website

About Raumlaborberlin

raumlaborberlin is a network, a collective of 9 trained architects who have come together in a collaborative work-structure. “We work at the intersection of architecture, city planning, art and urban intervention. We address in our work city and urban renewal as a process. We are attracted to difficult urban locations. Places torn between different systems, time periods or planning ideologies, that cannot adapt. Places that are abandoned, left over or in transition that contains some relevance for the processes of urban transformations. These places are our experimentation sites. They offer untapped potential which we try to activate. This opens new perspectives for alternative usage patterns, collective ideals, urban diversity and difference.

For our projects, we form tailored teams of interdisciplinary experts. City residents are also specialists. No one knows better in each respective situation than those who must deal with the places on a day-to-day basis. Thus, we can gain valuable information about the history, fears, desires, existential needs, as well as deficits, that exists like an invisible network over every spatial situation. 

An architecture in which it is possible to merge space with individual experience can uncover new qualities and leads to new images of the city created in the minds of its users. New options and possibilities appear on the horizon of places or buildings, were nothing seemed possible before, because they appeared finally defined, were given up or simply forgotten”. 

Kick-off EURAU26 LATITUDES and Organizing committee International Symposium, 19-20 May 2025

LATITUDES: Awareness, Rúrí

Image:Rúrí

Rúrí_Archive - Endangered Waters. The installation is the representation of Iceland at the 50. Biennale di Venezia – 2003.

This lecture held in May 2025 marked the first in a series organized by Umeå School of Architecture within the framework of EURAU26 – European Research in Architecture and Urbanism Symposium. Organized in collaboration with UmArts and Umeå Art Campus, the event introduced the thematic framework of the symposium LATITUDES: Situated Reflections on Architectural Research.

Icelandic artist Rúrí was invited as keynote speaker for this kick-off meeting, setting the tone for the call for paper and the dialogues that will unfold during the EURAU26 Symposium in June 2026.

About Rúrí

Image:Rúrí

Over a career spanning more than five decades, Rúrí, one of Iceland’s preeminent artists, has centered her artistic practice on moral and existential questions that confront inhumanity, imperialism, capitalism, social injustice, and environmental destruction. A pioneer of performance art in Iceland, she has worked across a wide range of media including painting, sculpture, photography, film, multimedia installation, writing, and performance.

Her groundbreaking performance Golden Car (1974) was among the first works in Iceland to engage explicitly with political activism. She represented Iceland at the 2003 Venice Biennale with Archive – Endangered Waters, an interactive multimedia installation presenting visual and acoustic data from 52 waterfalls threatened by dam construction in the Icelandic Highlands — a work that brought her international recognition.