Sound Playground
· About ·
My name is Isabel Gutiérrez Sánchez. I am a researcher and educator with a background in architecture and anthropology. Overall in my work, I am interested in the emergence of novel socio-ecological cultures promoted by grassroots groups and extitutional organisations in urban contexts marked by widespread processes of neoliberalisation and crisis. By focusing on practices and spaces of social and ecological care, commoning and collective struggle, this interest has led me to inquiry into organisational cultures, material politics, extitutional knowledges, emancipatory imaginaries, relational subjectivities and social geographies generated from the bottom-up.
In my projects, I use a range of ethnographic, artistic and radical pedagogic methods in experimental formats such as workshop series, art projects, exhibitions and participatory archives, which seek to engage communities around shared matters of concern. I am developing a research methodology underpinned by an intersectional approach and an ethics of care that designs situated compositions of theoretical, creative and relational methods.
Currently, I am affiliated to the Department of Anthropology of the Institute of Language, Literature and Anthropology at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC). I did my PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), and completed the MSc City Design & Social Science at the London School of Economics. I have held teaching positions at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and the UCL – the Bartlett School of Planning, the Department of Art History and the Development Planning Unit. In the past, I practised as an architect.
I am part of Mouries Collective, a group of female researchers, artists and therapists based in Athens (Greece). Through our projects, we develop methods, thoughts and intuitions to create connections with the beings who inhabit the land with us. Our collaborative work combines elements of performance, screenings, collective healing, rituals, drawing, storytelling and inner group practices of care.
This website gathers a quite varied array of works, from some dear projects from my years at the school of architecture to ethnographic projects that combine different media, writings, zines, collaborative workshops and performative actions. Perhaps, what cuts across them is a personal interest in the study and experimentation with counter-narratives, practices and imaginaries that can invoke living alternatives moving away from the logics of extraction, domination, numbness and abstraction that prevail in our wounded world.