Exhibition

  • LIGA Exhibition Program, 2016–2017
  • GRANTEE
    LIGA-Space for Architecture
    GRANT YEAR
    2016

UMWELT, Integra Offices, 2013, Osorno, X Regíon, Chile. Photo: Felipe Fontecilla.

LIGA–Space for Architecture is an exhibition-oriented platform, which focuses its efforts on displaying emerging and influential Latin-American–based practices, to develop a transnational culture around architecture and reach shared demographics. Each of the four, three-month-long programs explores site-specific ways of creating an architectural exhibition, as guest architects find innovative ways of displaying their work in avoidance of classical expositive standards. In tandem with the exhibitions is a series of events organized under the title Interludes, which present conferences, workshops, debates, and performances, in tangential relationships with architecture.

Isabel Martínez Abascal is the current executive director of LIGA. She studied at the Technische Universität in Berlin, and is a graduate of the Polytechnic University of Madrid. She worked with architect Balkrishna Doshi in Ahmedabad, SANAA in Tokyo, and for Aranguren & Gallegos in Madrid, before moving to São Paulo where she spent six years as lecturer in the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism Escola da Cidade. Among other projects, she was involved in curating the 10th São Paulo Architecture Biennale. In 2014 she cofounded the architecture studio LANZA Atelier with Alessandro Arienzo, and has lived in Mexico City since 2015. Martínez Abascal combines her professional work with personal projects of various kinds, understanding everything that she makes as architecture.

Productora is a Mexico City–based practice founded in 2006. Its founding members are Abel Perles, Carlos Bedoya, Victor Jaime, and Wonne Ickx. The firm is undertaking a variety of projects in Mexico and abroad (Asia and South America), ranging from single-family dwellings to offices and public buildings. Productora's work is published nationally and internationally and the office engages continuously in national and international competitions. They were selected for the Young Architects Forum and Emerging Voices series organized by the Architectural League in New York (2007 and 2013), and their work was presented at the Second Architecture Bienniale in Beijing (2006); an exhibition of forty-four young architects in Barcelona, Spain (2007); and the Venice Biennale (2008). Productora was selected by Herzog & de Meuron as one of the architectural studios to build a villa for the Ordos100 Project in Inner Mongolia, China and they won the International Competition for the CAF Headquarters in Caracas, Venezuela, in collaboration with Lucio Muniain (2008).

Ruth Estévez is the director and curator of the Gallery at REDCAT, Los Angeles. Between 2007 and 2011, Estévez served as chief curator at the Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, where she curated various exhibitions and projects with artists such as Mark Manders, Guy Ben-Ner, and Fernando Ortega, among others. In 2010, Estévez cofounded LIGA-Space for Architecture in Mexico City, the first space in Latin America devoted to the critical reflection and presentation of architecture. Estévez has written extensively for various exhibition catalogs and art publications and has independently organized exhibitions in Spain, Belgium, and the United States, as well as in Mexico. She holds a master's degree in art history from Mexico's National Autonomous University (UNAM), where she is a PhD candidate.

Ignacio Garcia Partarrieu and Arturo Scheidegger, both architects who earned an MArch from the Universidad Católica de Chile, founded UMWELT, an office of practice and research on architecture and territorial design, in 2011. UMWELT will design the first installation in LIGA's 2016–17 exhibition program.

LIGA–Space for Architecture is an independent initiative founded in Mexico City in 2011 that promotes Latin American contemporary architecture through exhibitions, conferences and workshops. LIGA was created as a curatorial platform in order to stimulate the experimentation in relation to the architectural discipline and its possibilities as a discursive practice, expanding and establishing connections with other disciplines. The annual calendar comprises four exhibitions in which emerging studios from across Latin America intervene the gallery's sixteen-square-meter space located on Insurgentes Avenue. In parallel to the exhibitions, there is a regular program entitled Interludes which presents conferences, workshops, debates, and performances, proposing tangential relationships with architecture.