Satellite Citizens brings together Dimensions of Citizenship participants and catalog essayists to discuss the past, present, and future of technology and space exploration. Who is excluded and included when we gaze upward to the cosmos or delve deep into the network? Panelists include writer Ingrid Burrington, designer/author Nicholas de Monchaux, and Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy of the collaborative practice Design Earth. Moderated by Jonathan Solomon, director of the Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects at School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

This event is presented concurrently with the Chicago presentation of the Graham funded exhibition Dimensions of Citizenship: Architecture and Belonging from the Body to the Cosmos, a reinstallation of the official US Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, at Wrightwood 659, which runs from February 28 through April 27, 2019.

Ingrid Burrington writes about the Internet, politics, and art, and has been published in The Atlantic, The Nation, ProPublica, San Francisco Art Quarterly, Dissent, and elsewhere. She’s given talks at conferences both in the US and abroad, and her art has been exhibited in galleries in New York, Tokyo, Leipzig, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and many other cities.

Nicholas de Monchaux is associate professor of architecture and urban design at University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011), an architectural and urban history of the Apollo Spacesuit, winner of the Eugene Emme award from the American Astronautical Society and shortlisted for the Art Book Prize. A monograph of his work on digital design and urban resilience, Local Code: 3,659 Proposals About Data, Design, and the Nature of Cities (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016). The work of de Monchaux’s Oakland-based practice has been exhibited widely, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Venice Architecture Biennale, and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. de Monchaux’s work has been supported by the Graham Foundation, the Hellman Family fund, the Santa Fe Institute, the Macdowell colony and the Smithsonian Institution. He is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome.

Led by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, Design Earth examines the geographies of urban systems—such as energy, trash, water, and agriculture—to prompt the debate on the techno-environment in the age of climate change. The design research practice has exhibited its works at the Venice Biennale and other leading international architecture events and has received numerous accolades, including the Young Architects Prize from the Architectural League of New York. Their After Oil project was collected by The Museum of Modern Art. Ghosn and Jazairy each hold Doctor of Design degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where they founded the journal New Geographies and were the respective editors for NG2: Landscapes of Energy and NG4: Scales of the Earth. They have authored numerous books, including the Graham Foundation grant-supported Geostories (Actar, 2018) and Geographies of Trash (Actar, 2015) as well as recent essays and projects published in Domus, Journal of Architectural Education, Avery Review, and Perspecta, among others. Ghosn is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture + Planning, and Jazairy is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

Jonathan Solomon is associate professor and director of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His drawings, analytical and counterfactual urban narratives, appear in Cities Without Ground (ORO, 2012), and 13 Projects for the Sheridan Expressway (PAPress, 2004). Solomon edits Forty-Five, a journal of outside research, and was curator of the US Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. His interests include extra-disciplinary, post-growth, and nonanthroponormative design futures. Solomon received a BA from Columbia University and an MArch from Princeton University and is a licensed architect in the State of Illinois.

Image: Cosmorama by Design Earth at the 2018 U.S. Pavilion. Photo © Tom Harris. Courtesy of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.

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Tags: Chicago, Dimensions of Citizenship, Dimensions of Citizenship Panel Discussion: Satellite Citizens, El Hadi Jazairy, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Ingrid Burrington, Jonathan Solomon, Near North Side, Nicholas de Monchaux, Rania Ghosn, SAIC, UChicago