Dezember 2023

Frances Anderton is the author of Common Ground: Multifamily Housing in Los Angeles, published by Angel City Press. She co-produced 40 Years of Building Community, a short film about the nonprofit housing developer Community Corporation of Santa Monica, and recently published a research paper on “Awesome and Affordable” housing as a Fellow of Friends of Residential Treasures: Los Angeles (FORT: LA). She contributes reporting on design and architecture to KCRW public radio station, for which she previously hosted the show DnA: Design and Architecture, and produced the current affairs shows Which Way, LA? and To The Point. Honors include the 2010 Esther McCoy Award, from the Architectural Guild of USC School of Architecture, where she currently teaches. Common Ground garnered a Gold award for best Regional Nonfiction from Foreword Reviews.

Lauren Bon is an environmental artist from Los Angeles. Her practice, Metabolic Studio, explores self-sustaining and self-diversifying systems of exchange that feed emergent properties that regenerate the life web. Some of her works include: Not A Cornfield, which transformed and revived an industrial brownfield in Downtown L.A. into a thirty-two-acre cornfield for one agricultural cycle; 100 Mules Walking the Los Angeles Aqueduct, a 240-mile performative action that aimed to reconnect the city of Los Angeles with the source of its water for the centenary of the opening of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Her studio’s current work, Bending the River, aims to utilize L.A.’s first private water right to deliver 106-acre feet of water annually from the L.A. River to over 50 acres of land in the historic core of Downtown.

Norman Klein is a critic, urban and media historian and novelist. His books include: The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory; Seven Minutes: The Life and Death of the American Animated Cartoon; The Vatican to Vegas: The History of Special Effects; Freud in Coney Island and Other Tales; and the database novel Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles, 1920-86. He is currently completing an interactive historical science fiction novel titled The Imaginary Twentieth Century. His essays have appeared in anthologies, museum catalogs, newspapers, scholarly journals and on the web. His work (including museum shows) has centered on the relationship between collective memory and power in urban spaces; the thin line between fact and fiction; and erasure, forgetting, scripted spaces and the social imaginary.

Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based critic, editor, and curator. She was co-curator of the U.S. Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale and co-curator of the 2020-2021 Exhibit Columbus entitled New Middles: From Main Street to Megalopolis, What is the Future of the Middle City? She has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Architectural Review, Metropolis, and Architect. She is an opinion columnist for Dezeen and former West Coast Editor of The Architects Newspaper. Zeiger is the 2015 recipient of the Bradford Williams Medal for excellence in writing about landscape architecture, where she is books editor.

*Diese Veranstaltung findet in englischer Sprache statt*

The Student Council consists of a team of highly engaged, talented, and diverse high school, undergraduate, and graduate students who invite prominent guest speakers to discuss topics relating to art, culture, politics, and society. In conversation with visual artists, musicians, dancers, writers, theater and filmmakers, cultural critics, curators, and others, the students will explore how the arts can make a difference in times of social and political crisis, on what social issues they can give new impulses, how they can help shape local communities, and how the alleged freedom and autonomy of the arts might impede or help the arts in terms of social and political significance.

Myriam Boulos was born in 1992 in Lebanon. At the age of sixteen, she started to use her camera to get closer to reality. She graduated with a master’s degree in photography from the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts in 2015. She has taken part in both national and international collective exhibitions, including Close Enough at ICP, NY; Infinite Identities at Huis Marseille, Amsterdam; and Troisième Biennale des Photographes du Monde Arabe, at l’Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris. Her work has been published in Aperture, FOAM, Time, GQ Middle East, Vogue Arabia, and Vanity Fair France, among other publications. In 2020 Myriam co-founded and became the photo editor of Al Hayya, a bilingual magazine that publishes literary and visual content on the works, interests and strife of women in her region. In 2021 she joined Magnum as a nominee. Her book, What’s ours, was published in November 2023 by Aperture.