Online Studio Sessions – Design Practice MArch

Join us online for a year long series of talks, screenings and discussions around the concerns of the Design Practice MArch; a new Masters programme at the Royal College of Art reimagining spatial practice in an age of promise for green transition, and against the backdrop of wildfire, emergent intelligence and exponentially developing technology.

Students and staff in the programme refuse to be driven to despair. We are concerned with the serious work of challenging the inherited conditions and terms of architectural practice, forging cross-disciplinary and anti-border alliances with humans, more-than-humans and sites exploited by building practices.

We give form, image and legibility to imaginaries for worlds otherwise, to allow us to build them today. We critically engage emerging technologies, tools and intelligences, contextualising them within globalised systems of production, logistics and capital, and exploring what they may offer the project of building more just, equitable worlds.

This series brings together practitioners, artists, curators and policy makers, engaging globally with guiding lights in the field.

Image: Solar Summit, Alyesha Choudhury, Design Practice MArch 24/25

Programme of sessions

• 12 March, 5pm GMT – Doris Salcedo

Further sessions and speakers will be announced in due course

Session details

12 March, 5pm GMT - Doris Salcedo

Doris Salcedo joins us for the MArch Design Practice Studio Sessions in the School of Architecture to discuss her practice through the lens of Fragmentos, a project that poses urgent questions about materials, transition, and the evolving role of monuments and anti‑monuments. Her talk will explore how Fragmentos redefines our relationship to collective memory and justice, engaging directly with two core units of the Design Practice curriculum: Material Processes, which asks how the political geographies of materials and conditions of extraction are central to spatial justice, and Just Transition, which develops the tools, arguments, and modes of practice needed to move the world toward just futures.

Doris Salcedo is a Colombian artist born in Bogotá in 1958, whose sculptures and installations function as a form of political and material archaeology. Working primarily with domestic objects — furniture, textiles, clothing — she transforms everyday materials into bearers of historical trauma, drawing extensively on Colombia's political history of conflict, disappearance, and state violence. Her practice moves between the intimate and the monumental. Early works used personal belongings linked to specific victims, while later large-scale installations occupied institutional and public spaces: a crack running the length of Tate Modern's Turbine Hall (Shibboleth, 2007); chairs lowered slowly down the façade of Bogotá's Palace of Justice over 53 hours (Noviembre 6 y 7, 2002); a vast shroud of fabric stitched across the Plaza Bolivar bearing the names of conflict victims written in ash (Sumando Ausencias, 2016). Across all these works, Salcedo is concerned with collective memory, grief, and the political conditions that produce suffering — and with what it means to make those conditions materially visible. Her work has been shown at Tate Modern, the Guggenheim, the Reina Sofía, and in major biennials including Documenta and Istanbul. She continues to live and work in Bogotá.

How to join

This event will take place virtually on Zoom. The event is free to attend, but you will need to register through Eventbrite to guarantee your spot and receive the Zoom link.

To avoid any technical issues on the day, we recommend you download the latest version of Zoom in advance.

When it’s time, come back to this Eventbrite page to join the event - you’ll get an email reminder on the day too.

Joining from a country where Zoom doesn't work?Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria and Ukraine (Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk regions) have restricted Zoom for regulatory reasons. Please reach out to recruitment@rca.ac.uk if this affects you.

About the host

Dr Thandi Loewenson - Head of Programme, Design Practice MArch

Thandi Loewenson (b.1989, Harare) is an architectural designer/researcher who mobilises design, fiction and performance to stoke embers of emancipatory political thought and fires of collective action, and to feel for the contours of other, possible worlds.

Other events at the RCA

We are continually adding to our diverse programme of events: conversations on key topics such as funding advice and portfolio development, symposia, exhibitions, open days and more. Many are free and open to the public.