Claudia Robalino
- Associate Lecturer (AcrossRCA)
Claudia is an architect, researcher, and educator whose work explores care, ritual, and more-than-human cohabitation through situated design, fieldwork, and cross-cultural storytelling.
Claudia Robalino is an Associate Lecturer and Tutor at the Royal College of Art, where she teaches across interdisciplinary programmes with a focus on climate crisis, care, and situated making.
She is an Ecuadorian architect and practice-based researcher working between architecture, performative fieldwork, and material storytelling. Claudia graduated from the RCA with an MA in Architecture where her thesis Tailoring Camouflage received the Head of Programme Prize and was nominated for the RIBA Silver Medal.
Her work spans teaching, research, and design practice across the UK, Europe and Latin America.
Key details
School, Centre or Area
Gallery
More information
Research interests
Claudia, an Ecuadorian-born architect and researcher, engages in experimental collaboration between indigenous and Western spatial narratives. She is committed to understanding regions politically framed by the value of their natural resources, which often neglect the invaluable knowledge for planetary reparation from the communities that have nurtured and inhabited these landscapes.
Working with overlapping boundaries across digital and physical mediums, she uses performative documentation and natural materials to respond to conflicted ecosystems through human and more-than-human agents. Her creative practice is rooted in crop systems and body-nature encounters, offering a unique approach to landscapes in transformation and a pathway to explore self-sustaining and cyclical modes of living. She is passionate about the role of women carriers of oral history and the archival of tradition through temporal, performative and rhythmic use of materials, body and space.
Claudia's work introduces a different perspective on foreign ecologies, employing the right to opacity as a design methodology to resist extractive narratives and invasive, colonialist fieldwork. Her research weaves together digital immersions, material as both object and space, and critical writing to uncover the multiple layers of dialogue, collaborations, and knowledge exchanged within an ethical practice of care.
Awards
Silver Medal Nominee, RIBA Presidents Medal, 2021
Dean’s Prize, RCA, 2021
Head of Programme Prize, RCA, 2021
Shortlisted, Arts Thread, 2021
Current and recent projects
From a Man-made Rose
2023
Co-developed with Designer Charlotte Moore
The project analyses the synthetic and spatial infrastructures that underpin the territorial and chemical dislocation caused by the anthropogenic treatment of the Rose as a factory-farmed crop. Working between Ecuador and the UK, the exploration is centred around the territorial marginalisation of indigenous food crops, displaced for the Rose; the role of female workers; and the molecular trace effects of the Rose’s chemical ecologies.
Tailoring Camouflage
2021–Present
Tailoring camouflage is a portal to the Amazon forest and the relations between nature and ritual. A transcription of the role of the body and the value of the Huaorani women as nurtures and constructors of the forest through oral histories. A parallel understanding of ‘chakra’ as a garden of knowledge through performative occupation and the conflicting urban and ecological encounters between indigenous and Western worldviews.