Claudia Robalino
- Associate Lecturer (AcrossRCA)
Claudia is a practice-based researcher and architect. Her work is concerned with exploring conflicted ecologies through performative fieldwork, storytelling and cross-cultural collaboration.
Claudia investigates alternative modes of being in territories affected by extractive and colonial interventions. She conducts research on performative encounters, intercultural communication and inclusive design systems of human-nature cohabitation. Moreover, her work has expanded into participatory fieldwork and documentation in the Ecuadorian Amazon, Andes and the Galapagos.
Claudia holds an MA in Architecture from the RCA, where she was nominated for the RIBA Silver Medal Prize, Dean’s Award and received the Head of Programme Prize for her thesis 'Tailoring Camouflage'. She has held exhibitions and participated in residencies and lectures internationally, including in Ecuador, Spain, Italy and China.
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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.