Luisa Brando
Luisa Brando is dedicated to producing visual art, design and architecture projects sensitive to heritage conservation and dichotomies between nature and culture, tradition and development. Working on the edge between fields and geographies, her ethnographic research becomes a ground to later creating spaces that incite to re-imagine current static borders around the public sphere. Her transdisciplinary practice asks to observe, engage and challenge habitual modes of perception, between ecology, culture and public space. Currently her research is on rivers and the conservation policies around water, exploring how planning has imaged and imagined rivers as borders instead of central regional connectors. Continuing a 4-year field work and academic research around Magdalena River in Colombia, her work continues across different cultures researching and re-imaging the geopolitics of water. Water does not respond to the static administrative boundaries. Rivers are both ephemeral and cyclical, visible and invisible, past and future, culture and nature.
Brando completed an artist-in-residence program on water in NAHR, Italy (2018), is guarantor of the Summer Research Asian Center at Harvard University (2017) documenting and researching Shinto Temples and the Japanese conservation methodologies, and a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University (2016). Her public art installations have been presented in Sottochiesa, Italy and in Kura Gallery in Tokyo, Japan. She has participated in group exhibitions in Harvard Student Art Show in Boston, and in Espacio Odeon, Feria del Millón and Galeria el Museo in Bogota. Brando currently works in NY and Boston. She holds a Bachelor in Architecture from Universidad de los Andes (2013), and a Master in Design Studies in Critical Conservation from Harvard University (2018).
Harvard Affiliation / Current Practice
Harvard Graduate School of Design
Master in Design Studies in Critical Conservation, 2018
