MIT
Thesis work for SMArchS AD (Master of Science in Architecture+Design)
Mixed media, Artifacts, Film, and Multi-Channel Installation
2024
[Maíz] can become anything. It is everywhere and keeps transforming.
My work envisions tools for world-building, considering architecture as an expanded practice that overlays different histories, spaces, cultures, temporalities, and understandings through various media. The value of maíz lies in its significance—both symbolic and dietary—in shaping the landscapes and spaces it encounters. Around the same time that maíz became a staple food, it also began to take on a visual and symbolic role, appearing in material expressions within art and architecture.
My thesis explores the slipperiness of maíz through its symbols, systems, and associations, becoming a relational agent continuously under construction. Acknowledging this monumental scale positions my work as a grain-sized glimpse into its speculative potential. Central to my approach is my interpretation of José Chávez Morado’s 1949 artwork Río Revuelto, which serves as a guiding framework for navigating the kaleidoscopic entanglement of narratives and cultural conditions.
I work through a spinning diagram that connects variables into the multiple myths, forms, commodities, and cultures deployed by corn. The diagram operates under four categories: cosmologies, national identity, resistance, and product. These categories reflect my disciplinary perspective, depicting how architecture, as an expanded practice, operates simultaneously through these four lenses. I argue for constant feedback between them for re-transforming perceptions.
Via an essay film and a collection of performative artifacts, I provide examples of how any two variables within the diagram lead to a particular relation with maíz. The artifacts are performative, oscillating between the familiar and, at other times, bizarre, metaphorical, and speculative. Whether referencing myths, building typologies, displays, rituals, histories, or commodities, the artifacts become mnemonic objects—tools for thinking about maíz as a world-building exercise. These objects depict the rituals and cycles of maíz, presenting it as a trans-scalar agent for imagining new relational methods.
Advised by:
Jaffer Kolb
Xavi L. Aguirre
Renée Green