I was trained as an architect between Chilean Patagonia and Germany, and I work as an artist and theorist at the intersection of architectural history, collage, and material salvage. I’m currently an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, where I teach design and architectural theory.

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I studied architecture at the Universidad Austral de Chile, completing my degree with DAAD-funded studies at the Technical University of Munich. I then moved into heritage studies with a Master’s in Cultural Heritage at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, and later completed a PhD in Architecture and Design Research at Virginia Tech’s Washington–Alexandria Architecture Center.

My dissertation, SCISSION: The Architectural Collage and Gordon Matta-Clark’s Circus or The Caribbean Orange, examines how a drawn line can become space. I read CCO as an ephemeral adaptive reuse project that lasted only two weeks. This research took me into archives and collections at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, and the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, where I worked closely with drawings, photographs, and documents to understand his tools and methods from the inside. I came to think of his approach as a method that can inform new ways of making architecture,a way of tying the architect’s embodied work at the table to the surgical work on the building itself.

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My practice grows out of, and also pushes against, a family of artists who treat architecture as material to cut, displace, and restage. I am in close dialogue with Gordon Matta-Clark’s opened and sutured buildings and Robert Smithson’s displacements and entropic sites, and I borrow from the way Cornelia Parker suspends debris, Rachel Whiteread casts absence, and Mark Bradford tears and rewrites the city as a ground of paper.

At the same time, the deepest coordinates of my work are southern and Latin American: the floating palafitos of Chiloé, the magic-realist fog of Patagonia, and the vastness of the territory traced in the collages and writings of Edward Rojas; Germán Arestizábal and the counter-poetics of Nicanor Parra and Raúl Zurita. In theory, I come out of the tradition opened by Marco Frascari: drawing as a way of thinking, the detail as a carrier of meaning, architecture as a narrative and inhabited body. All my research has been developed in close dialogue with Paul Emmons and is informed by the work of Alberto Pérez-Gómez, among many others. From them I inherit a way of doing theory that is slow, textual, and imaginative, something that runs underneath my cuts, collages, and installations.

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My installations and collages have been shown in Chile, Croatia, Spain, the Netherlands, Russia, and the United States, including exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Valdivia, Santa Rosa Gallery in Santiago, and venues in Alexandria and Washington, DC. In 2024–25 I presented Homesick at the District Architecture Center (AIA|DC).

My research and creative practice have received support from private and public grants, such as FONDART, and from Virginia Tech’s Initiated Research Grant, and Excelsa Artist support Grant. I also write regularly; recent and forthcoming texts include “Fundamentals: An Object: The Light Table Cut” in Vesper (IUAV) and chapters in different volumes such as the Routledge books Finishing: The End of Architecture and (Un)Common Precedents in Architecture.

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Across drawings, cuts, and installations, I treat architecture as a wounded archive. Buildings, books, and domestic objects are sliced open to let other memories and possible futures leak out, and to question of what to cut, what to show and how the new make the reanimation. I come to all of this from the cut, which I understand as a katagraphic operation or a scission: a wounded drawing that sutures together vernacular buildings, colonial histories, and the lived experience of migration. I often rescue elements of the built environment—doors, furniture, wall panels, barns, and other structures on the verge of demolition—cut them, move them, and restage them, giving them one last moment in time, a last dance.