This event will be screened in Room 315F and through Zoom. 

For in-person attendance, please register in advance here. 
For Zoom attendance, please register in advance here.

Through writing and curation, Abiba Coulibaly and Thomas Aquilina seek ways to archive diasporic spaces which have been lost to, and reconfigured by, extractive processes at an accelerating speed in London. Drawing on their experiences leading New Architecture Writers and Brixton Community Cinema, this talk explores the fraught and symbiotic relationship between the city and cultural innovation. Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa will join the conversation presenting some of his own work in response to their framing of the lecture. 

A discussion and Q&A moderated by Asialy Bracey Gardella will follow the presentations. 

Abiba Coulibaly is a film curator with a background in critical geography. Her work focuses on democratising access to cinema as both a space and medium, exploring how moving image intersects with and furthers claims for civic and spatial equity. She is the founder of Brixton Community Cinema and Atlas Cinema, Associate Programmer at Open City Documentary Festival and previously held the position of Associate Lecturer at the Royal College of Art's School of Architecture.

Thomas Aquilina is an architect and academic dedicated to building communities of radical imagination and collective practice. He is an Associate Professor and co-director of Spatial Justice at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His current research draws on diasporic spatial experiences in both global and local contexts from downtown Kingston in Jamaica to North Kensington in London.

Guillermo Ruiz de Teresa serves as Deputy Director and Curator at Storefront for Art and Architecture. His research and curatorial practice sits at the intersection of space, care, and power, working across disciplinary boundaries to interrogate how art, design, and politics shape one another. Trained as an architect and urbanist at the Architectural Association and Universidad Iberoamericana, Guillermo holds a Masters in Design Studies from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and was a Stavros Niarchos Foundation PhD Scholar, Visiting Lecturer, and Researcher at the Royal College of Art in London. He co-leads a seminar on Public Art as Alimentary Infrastructure at The Cooper Union's School of Architecture.

The Diane Lewis Student Lecture Series is endowed by Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown.

This event is free and open to the public. Registration is required.