2026–27 VASE Lecture Series
I will be giving a talk at the University of Arizona as one of the 2026–27 VASE (Visiting Artists and Scholars Endowment) Lecture Series, hosted by the School of Art and the College of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture “Grand Lecture Series” sponsored by the Jones Studio.
I’ll present some of the research in my new book:
Spatial Solidarities at Dawson Island, 1889 & 1973
Dawson Island, located in the southern edge of Chile, was the site of a detention and torture center for political prisoners of the Pinochet dictatorship, the regime that violently took over the country in 1973. One century before, the island was used for an Indigenous internment center, meant to isolate the nomad groups that inhabited the broader archipelago and turn their land over to lucrative cattle ranches.I examine the similarities between the settler colonial Chilean state at the end of the nineteenth century and the dictatorship of the late twentieth century, as well as the spatial forms of solidarity mobilized by the individuals imprisoned by this regime in order to resist its violence and reclaim their agency.
I’ll present some of the research in my new book:
Spatial Solidarities at Dawson Island, 1889 & 1973
Dawson Island, located in the southern edge of Chile, was the site of a detention and torture center for political prisoners of the Pinochet dictatorship, the regime that violently took over the country in 1973. One century before, the island was used for an Indigenous internment center, meant to isolate the nomad groups that inhabited the broader archipelago and turn their land over to lucrative cattle ranches.I examine the similarities between the settler colonial Chilean state at the end of the nineteenth century and the dictatorship of the late twentieth century, as well as the spatial forms of solidarity mobilized by the individuals imprisoned by this regime in order to resist its violence and reclaim their agency.