Spatial designer, artist/researcher - portfolio 2025
https://spatialaffairs.agency/
MARIA CATALINA VENEGAS RABA
Printing workshop and fanzine launch ‘Dwelling in Scarcity: Artisan Revival in the Wake of the Apocalypse’ - public result of a Seminar on ‘Care’
CONCORDIA MARKET
The project ‘La Concordia en sus palabras’ (La Concordia in your own words) was produced as part of an artistic residency in Bogota, Colombia between June and December 2022, funded by IDARTES and the British Council.
Through a series of workshops with the community of neighbours of the modernist market La Concordia, I collected oral histories of the recently ‘regenerated’ market. The final output was a series of fanzines where these histories were published.
BURGESS PARK: A
Since October 2024, I have been facilitating a series of interdisciplinary workshops with the international student cohort of the MA Interior and Spatial Design program at Camberwell College of Arts. Across two iterations, the workshops invited students to reinterpret and reimagine the overlooked materials and waste from the art school environment, as well as from nearby Burgess Park (right).
Through a dynamic combination of fiction writing, mask making, performance design, and printmaking, students collaboratively explored themes of transformation, storytelling, and site-specificity. The process culminated in the creation of a series of zines that document both the creative journey and the final outcomes of the workshops, under the title ‘A Burgess Park Bestiary’.
[Right] Burgess Parl: A Bestiary Mask making + Printmaking + Zinemaking workshop series
BACHUE BASTARDS
was developed during a month-long-month residency in the Venice Biennale Architettura College in June 2023. As one of the seven selected participants for the collaboration, I contributed to designing and producing an embodied, sitespecific performance, documented in a film, that presented architectural and ecological narratives to wider audiences.
Building on my research into Andean antiextractivist mythologies, I re-staged a feminist folk story from the Boyaca region in Colombia. The story describes a creature that sabotages mining enterprises near a flooded valley, now a dam called La Esmeralda.
By re-situating these myths in the landscape of the Venice lagoon, I engaged with its histories of flooding, infrastructural dam constructions, Murano glass manufacturing, local crafts and practices of reparation. I worked with local craftsmen and repurposed discarded glass deemed “impure”, reinterpreting it as jewellery, and creating a decolonial version of the Venice Carnival’s iconic Moon Mask. I explored diverse tactics and motifs such as rewilding, salt marshes foraging, fabulation and other local practices of ecological reparation.
The final performance, the Bachue bastard, featured on the film ‘Monsters for Radical Empathy’, presented to an international group of critics, artists and architects alike.
[Left] Stills from ‘Bachue Bastards’ Site-Specific performance Venice, 2023
was a nocturnal walk / feminist masquerade workshop developed for Publica Studio and the City of London in March 2025 for the Right to the City project. The project demonstrated that the creative methods that the selected artists proposed, myself included, achieved joyful reclamation, belonging and communty-led call for change.
Through the masquerade, women and non-binary participants came together to reimagine safer and more inclusive cities as well as alternative ways to inhabit the alleways of the City of London, through an embodied an powerful way that bridge personal stories with collective action.
