Marina Otero Verzier is an architect based in Rotterdam. She is currently Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut, and curator of WORK, BODY, LEISURE, the Dutch Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2018. With the After Belonging Agency, Marina was Chief Curator of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016. From 2011-2015 she was based in New York, where she was Director of Global Network Programming at Studio-X, Columbia University.

Her work, recently awarded by The Graham Foundation, Design Trust, and the FAD Thought and Criticism Award, has been published in different books and journals. Marina has co-edited Promiscuous Encounters (2014), Unmanned: Architecture and Security Series (2016), After Belonging: The Objects, Spaces, and Territories of the Ways We Stay In Transit (2016).

Otero Verzier studied architecture at TU Delft and ETSA Madrid. In 2013, as a Fulbright Scholar, she graduated from the M.S. in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture at Columbia University GSAPP. She completed her PhD at ETSAM in 2016. She currently teaches at ETSA Madrid and RCA in London.

Amal Alhaag is an Amsterdam based independent curator, cultural programmer and researcher who develops experimental research practice, public program and projects on current (global) social affairs, decoloniality, counter-culture, oral histories and popular culture. Her work explores these themes through short- and long-term collaborations with artists, (non)institutions and audiences. Since 2004 her projects have infused music and art with current affairs, dialogic and everyday anecdotes to invite, stage or examine ‘uncomfortable‘ issues, unknown stories and unwelcome audiences to write, share or compose narratives in impermanent settings.

Previously Amal Alhaag worked as cultural programmer at the Tolhuistuin, Amsterdam (2009-2012), and as the curator for public programming at Het Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam (2013-2014). Alhaag is currently curator public programming and research at the Research Center for Material Culture in Leiden (2015-ongoing). Amal is the artistic director of Metro54, platform for urban arts and culture in the Netherlands (2009-ongoing) and associate curator at Framer Framed (2015-ongoing). Together with artist Maria Guggenbichler she co-founded the Side Room (2013-ongoing), a platform for ex-centric cultural practices in Amsterdam.

Internationally renowned architectural historian and theorist Beatriz Colomina is Professor of Architecture and Founding Director of the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University. Her books include Manifesto Architecture: The Ghost of Mies (Sternberg Press, 2014), Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X (2010), Domesticity at War (2007), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (1994) and Sexuality and Space (1992). She is curator with a team of Princeton Ph.D. students of the exhibitions Clip/Stamp/Fold: The Radical Architecture of Little Magazines 196X-197X, Playboy Architecture, 1953-79, and Radical Pedagogies: Architectural Education in a Time of Disciplinary Instability. Together with Mark Wigley, Colomina was the curator of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, Are We Human? Recently, she organized together with e-flux Architecture and The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, the international symposium Superhumanity: Post-Labor, Psychopathology, Plasticity. As part of her recent work, Colomina addresses the use of the bed as an office and workspace, and re-examines the bed as a unique horizontal architecture.

Marten Kuijpers is a Rotterdam-based architect and researcher. He studied architecture at the University of Technology in Eindhoven and graduated with distinction in 2008. He worked for several Dutch architectural practices. He curated the lectures and debates program of the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI) between 2010 and 2013. Since 2013, Marten has been responsible for the program track Landscape & Interior within Het Nieuwe Instituut’s Research department and was curator of several exhibitions at the institute, including Munich 1972 (2016) and Sicco Mansholt. A Good European (2014). His current research focuses on the implications of automation for the built environment, based on present-day case studies in the Netherlands and the Pearl River Delta region, as part of the research project Automated Landscapes, initiated by Het Nieuwe Instituut in 2017.

Víctor Muñoz Sanz is a Spanish-Mexican architect based in Amsterdam. His work examines the spatial dimensions of initiatives and innovations of industrial entrepreneurs, and the architectures of human and automated labor. Networked Utopia, his Ph.D. dissertation, examined the transnational urbanism of the Bata Shoe Company and showed how its corporate practices translated into built form. Currently, in different institutions and research formats, Víctor is looking at the spaces of industrial offshoring and reshoring in the context of radical shifts in the politics and technologies of production: at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, he is responsible for a conversation on the legacy of corporate driven actions in industrial offshoring destinations; at TU Delft, he is part of ‘Cities of Making’, a project that explores opportunities for strengthening urban manufacturing in European cities. And at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Víctor is co-principal researcher of ‘Automated Landscapes’, a project revealing the spatial production of full-automation.

SCN is a body at work in Amsterdam. Her practice challenges forms of identity representation and capture technologies operating within the space of appearance. SCN interfaces with her computer work station via an ergonomic gaming mouse. Some buttons on the device are custom programmed to efficiently execute repeated workflows. Is ergonomic design shaped to support the human body or does it define what a body is? SCN’s work questions the bodily parameters embedded in design software and task simulation tools and the spatial configurations they produce.

Architecture historian, theorist, and critic Mark Wigley is Professor and Dean Emeritus of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. The author of The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida's Haunt (1993), White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture (1995), and Constant's New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire (1998), and Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio (2016). He co-edited, with Catherine de Zegher, The Activist Drawing: Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant's New Babylon to Beyond, (2001), and was one of the founders of Volume magazine. He has curated exhibitions at the MoMA in New York, the Witte de With in Rotterdam, The Drawing Center in New York, and the CCA in Montreal. Together with Beatriz Colomina, Wigley was the curator of the 3rd Istanbul Design Biennial, Are We Human? Recently, he organized together with e-flux Architecture and The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, the international symposium Superhumanity: Post-Labor, Psychopathology, Plasticity. His exhibition The Human Insect: Antenna Architectures 1887-2017 is on show at Het Nieuwe Instituut until 23-09-2018.

Matthew Stewart teaches architecture at the University of Westminster and is a designer, writer and researcher. Jane Chew is an architect and researcher based in London. Matthew and Jane’s current research is focused on the everyday spatial implications of automation. Their proposal for Het Nieuwe Instituut theme ‘Work, Body, Leisure’ is based on a piece Matthew is writing for the online research platform Failed Architecture. It forms part of a wider project looking at Big Techs use of international patenting rights, from both a legal and spatial standpoint, to define questions on future automation. This builds on a recent competition they won to undertake a design and research residency in Sweden organised by Andreas Angelidakis as part of the Kalejdohill project. The residency used 3d scanning and digital projections to consider issues surrounding data collection, home automation and the Internet of Things.

Noam Toran’s practice reflects upon the interrelations of history, memory, and storytelling as embodied in cinematic, literary, and performative forms. Research based, the works examine how fictions influence the collective consciousness, and are realised through an original way of reconfiguring narrative codes, conventions and structures, and weaving them with historical materials. He was recently a research fellow at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam and is currently developing a series of gallery shows and educational projects in which the materialities of early 20th century political theatre and performance are revived through new adaptations, dramatisations and re-enactments. His work is exhibited, screened and published internationally and is part of numerous public and private collections.

Giuditta Vendrame is a designer and researcher based in Eindhoven. Through her practice, she explores the intersections between design, artistic research, and legal systems. Paolo Patelli is an architect and a researcher, currently Associate Reader “Places and Traces” at the Design Academy Eindhoven and a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. He engages critically and by design with space, technology and society. Giulio Squillacciotti is an artist, film director and researcher based in Milan and Maastricht at the Jan Van Eyck Academie Residency. His work is primarily focused on storytelling, cultural apexes and the way traditions re-shape in new contexts, merging together fiction and historical facts.

“Shore Leaves” shows and investigates, through a short video and a symposium, the entanglements of individual rights and international mobility, human presence and the labor still essential in cargo shipping, as crewless ships are being announced and automated docks developed. The video is an intimate portrait of the activities, the gestures, the routines of the sailors while on shore leave, where their hands, while temporarily freed from labor, still cannot carry out meaningful actions. Providing seafarers assistance and welfare is left to voluntaries and associations, whose work in the ports of Rotterdam and Venice is also documented.

Northscapes is an interdisciplinary research collective and a think-tank composed of Hamed Khosravi, Taneha Kuzniecow Bacchin, and Filippo La Fleur. Their projects focus on transitional territories, exploring dynamic processes of temporal and spatial transformations of both land and maritime landscapes. Through their projects they investigate interrelations between natural processes, societal practices, and (geo-)political projects. Northscapes puts a strong emphasis on the agency of spatial interventions as well as fictional narratives in the production of the idea of the territory; Drawings, maps and images form, and are informed by, narratives of spatial propositions over time. In this context, infrastructure is seen as a crucial medium – manifesting the programmatic and spatial dimensions of a territorial project. In response to the general theme of the Biennale Architettura 2018, ‘Free space’, and the theme of the Dutch Pavilion ‘Work, Body, Leisure’ Northscapes proposes an installation and series of collateral events for the period of the biennale. Their proposal, ‘The Port and the Fall of Icarus’ is the development and continuation of a long-term research and design project on the topic of logistics and its architectural, social, and political implications.

Liam Young is a speculative architect who operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures. He is cofounder of  Tomorrows Thoughts Today, an urban futures think tank, exploring the local and global implications of new technologies and Unknown Fields, a nomadic research studio that travels on expeditions to chronicle these emerging conditions as they occur on the ground. He has been acclaimed in both mainstream and architectural media, including the BBC, NBC, Wired, Guardian, Time, and Dazed and Confused, is a BAFTA nominated producer and his work has been collected by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum and MAAS in Sydney. He has taught internationally at the Architectural Association, Princeton University and now runs the ground breaking MA in Fiction and Entertainment at Sci Arc in Los Angles. Liam's narrative approach sits between documentary and fiction as he focuses on projects that aim to reveal the invisible connections and systems that make the modern world work. Liam now manages his time between exploring distant landscapes and prototyping the future worlds he extrapolates from them.

Nick Axel is an architect, theorist and editor based in Amsterdam. He is currently Deputy Editor of e-flux architecture. Previously, he was Managing Editor of Volume magazine (#44– 49), Researcher at Forensic Architecture, and Resident at DAAR (Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency). Nick studied at the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, London, where he investigated the legal and spatial deregulation of hydraulic fracturing in the United States. Nick has led courses in architecture, theory, and design at Strelka Institute, Design Academy Eindhoven, Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, and The Bartlett School of Architecture.

Katía Truijen is a media theorist based in Rotterdam. Since 2014, she has been developing programs in the field of digital culture within Het Nieuwe Instituut's Research department. Currently, she is assistant curator for WORK, BODY, LEISURE, the Dutch Pavilion at the Biennale Architettura 2018, and managing editor for the forthcoming publication Architecture of Appropriation: On Squatting as Spatial Practice (Het Nieuwe Instituut, 2018). Katía has published on digital culture and design for many leading cultural platforms in the Netherlands. She graduated from the M.A. in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam, and completed the Art & Research Honours Programme at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie. Previously, she taught at the University of Amsterdam, department of Media Studies, and the Netherlands Film Academy.

Raphael Coutin is a spatial designer and researcher based in Eindhoven. Since 2015, he has worked at the intersection of design and architecture as an independent studio. Trained in sculpture at ENSAAMA in Paris and later in social design at Design Academy Eindhoven, Raphael develops his practices by collaborating with diverse creative studios, institutions and schools, exploring the creative world of design.

Raphael seeks to create a dialogue between his design, its territory and concept, based on the premise that projects always take place in a specific social and geographical context. He sees design as a tool for building connections and for transforming ideas, ideals, vision or reflection into an understandable, tangible outcome. Maquettes, drawings, 3d models, animation and scale prototypes are just some of the approaches Raphael uses to develop projects in to a specific reality.

Hans Gremmen is an Amsterdam based graphic designer and founder of publishing house Fw:Books. As a designer he works in the fields of fine arts, photography and architecture, for clients such as Office of Contemporary Art Norway, TU Delft, Architectura & Natura, and the Aperture Foundation. Hans Gremmen studied at AKV St.Joost, Breda (B.A.), and at ArtEZ, Arnhem (M.F.A.). He has taught at ArtEZ (Graphic Design, Typography dept.); at AKV. St.Joost, (Visual Communication dept.), and at the HKU (Graphic Design dept.)