Marina Otero Verzier

Marina Otero Verzier is an architect and researcher working at the intersection of critical spatial practices, ecology, technology, and activism. She is a Lecturer in Architecture at Harvard GSD and has led the Data Mourning clinic at Columbia University’s GSAPP.

Previously, she was Head of the MA Social Design at Design Academy Eindhoven and Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut. She has curated exhibitions at major international venues, including the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Oslo Architecture Triennale.

She is the author of Flotando en Litio (2025) and En las Profundidades de la Nube (2024), and co-editor of Automated Landscapes (2023), Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), More-than-Human (2020), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), and Work, Body, Leisure (2018), among others.

Otero Verzier also works across design, art, and filmmaking. She has co-directed five films presented at major international venues and festivals. Her latest film, Building for Quantum (2025), co-directed with Manuel Correa, premiered at the Venice Architecture Biennale and was recently acquired by MUDAC in Lausanne for its permanent collection.

Her work has received several international awards. The Opera Aperta pavilion, which she co-curated, received a Special Mention at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. Computational Compost was awarded by Ars Electronica and the Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism in 2025. In 2022, she received Harvard GSD’s Wheelwright Prize.

From exploding lithium batteries and failing AI systems to rockets disintegrating mid-flight and electric vehicles catching fire, contemporary technologies are saturated with moments of rupture. Yet these failures are often framed as evidence of experimentation, ambition, and visionary thinking.

Mirroring Silicon Valley's mantra, "move fast and break things," contemporary culture has come to equate destruction with innovation. Explosions operate both literally and metaphorically: they refer to the material volatility of contemporary technologies, but also to the political tensions and social unrest driven by deepening inequality and ecological collapse.