SUPERHUMANITY TALKS at e-flux

Mabel O. Wilson is the Nancy and George E Rupp Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and a Professor in African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University. With her practice Studio&, she was a member of the design team that recently completed the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia. Exhibitions of her work have been featured at Venice Architecture Biennale, SFMoMA, Art Institute of Chicago, Istanbul Design Biennale, Wexner Center for the Arts, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum’s Triennial, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Wilson has authored Begin with the Past: Building the National Museum of African American History and Culture (2016) and Negro Building: Black Americans in the World of Fairs and Museums (2012), and co-edited the volume Race and Modern Architecture: From the Enlightenment to Today (2020). For the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, she was co-curator of the exhibition Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America (2021). She’s a founding member of Who Builds Your Architecture? (WBYA?) a collective that advocates for fair labor practices on building sites worldwide.

Mark Wigley is a Professor and Dean Emeritus at the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. As an architectural theorist and historian, Wigley explores the intersection of architecture, art, philosophy, culture, and technology. He wrote We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture with Beatriz Colomina (Lars Müller, 2025) and Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design with Beatriz Colomina (Lars Müller, 2016) and co-curated “We the Bacteria Notes. Toward Biotic Architecture” (Triennale Milano, 2025), again with Beatriz Colomina.

Anton Vidokle is an artist and editor of e-flux journal.

Martha Rosler utilizes various media in her work, primarily video and photography, and also installation and sculpture; she also writes about art and culture. Her work has for decades considered matters of the public sphere and mass culture; war and geopolitical conflict; housing, urbanism, and the built environment, and systems of transportation—especially as these affect women. Many of her projects have been extrainstitutional or developed and enacted with groups of people. Rosler sees her work, her teaching, and her writing as continuations of a broader engagement with the currents of cultural critique and social and political change. Her work may best be summed up as both a conceptual art and an activist practice—focused on questions of representational form but joined, however uneasily, to a commitment to political agitation. Video, which she adopted in its infancy, presented itself as at the crossroads of both. Rosler spent the 1970s in California and Canada. In 1980, she returned to her native Brooklyn, where she lives and works.

Spyros Papapetros is Associate Professor of History and Theory in the School of Architecture and the Program in Media and Modernity at Princeton University.

Lydia Kallipoliti is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at The Cooper Union in New York and the author of The Architecture of Closed Worlds (2018). She is the principal of ANAcycle thinktank.

Andrés Jaque is the Dean of Columbia GSAPP and founder of the Office for Political Innovation, a transdisciplinary agency working at the intersection of design, research, and environmental activism. Jaque’s work explores architecture as a cosmopolitical practice and its social and ecological networks.

Brooke Holmes is the Susan Dod Brown Professor of Classics at Princeton University, where she is also Director of the Gauss Seminars in Criticism. She is the author of The Symptom and the Subject: The Emergence of the Physical Body in Ancient Greece (Princeton, 2010) and Gender: Antiquity and its Legacy (Bloomsbury, 2012). She is currently completing a book entitled Sympathy and the Tissue of the World: Life, Community, and Nature in the Ancient Mediterranean.

Rubén Gallo teaches at Princeton University and is author of Freud's Mexico (MIT Press, 2010) and Proust's Latin Americans (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014).

Beatriz Colomina is the Howard Crosby Butler Professor of the History of Architecture at Princeton University. Her books include We the Bacteria: Notes Toward Biotic Architecture with Mark Wigley (Lars Müller, 2025), X-Ray Architecture (Lars Müller, 2019), Are We Human? Notes on an Archaeology of Design with Mark Wigley (Lars Müller, 2016), Domesticity at War (Actar and MIT, 2007), Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (MIT, 1994), and Sexuality and Space (PAP, 1992). She co-curated "We the Bacteria: Toward Biotic Architecture" at the Triennale Milano (2025) with Mark Wigley, and her coedited volumes include Sick Architecture (MIT, 2025), Radical Pedagogies (MIT, 2022), and Clip/Stamp/Fold (Actar, 2010).

Nick Axel is Deputy Editor of e-flux Architecture and the Head of the Architectural Design department at Gerrit Rietveld Academie. He was recently Editor of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, and from 2020–2022, was Curator of Architecture and Chair of the Architectural Advisory Board at the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, Kyiv.

Lucia Allais is an architectural historian who writes about design, politics, and technology in the modern period and on the global stage. Her first book, Designs of Destruction: the Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2018. She has written numerous articles about the history of architectural knowledge, including “The Real and the Theoretical, 1968” and “Rendering: On Experience and Experiments.” Most recently, she co-authored, with Forrest Meggers, a critical history of the carbonation equation for reinforced concrete, titled “Concrete is 100 years Old.” Allais is Associate Professor of Architecture at Columbia University, the Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture, a member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative, and an editor of the journal Grey Room.