Exhibition

  • LIGA Exhibition Program, 2025
    Departamento del Distrito, DUB Arquitectura, and gru.a
    Architects
    Wonne Ickx and Frida Mouchlian
    Curators
    LIGA-Space for Architecture, Mexico City,
    Jan to Dec 2025
  • GRANTEE
    LIGA-Space for Architecture
    GRANT YEAR
    2024

DUB Arquitectura, “La Escocesa," Buenos Aires, 2022. Photo: Fernando Schapochnik

LIGA—Space for Architecture is an exhibit‐oriented platform that focuses on displaying emerging and influential architectural practices in Latin America, to present interesting proposals between culturally parallel countries to expand the audience for the practices. Each exhibition is a site‐specific installation by an invited architect that explores the innovative ways of making an architectural exhibition, beyond traditional exhibition-making approaches. The 2025 program includes three exhibitions by practices across Latin America: Departamento del Distrito, Mexico; gru.a, Brazil; and DUB Arquitectura, Argentina.

Departamento Del Distrito is a design office based in Mexico City founded in 2017 by Francisco Quiñones and Nathan Friedman. They participated in the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennial and were awarded the 2022 Architectural League Prize in recognition of the diversity of their work that operates at the intersection of politics, identity, and the built environment. In addition to architectural projects, Departamento del Distrito also undertakes archival research, critical writing, and speculative work.

DUB Arquitectura is led by Angie Dub who, in parallel to her practice, is coordinator and professor of the master’s degree progrram in sustainability in architecture and urbanism at the University of Buenos Aires. Trained around the world, she started her studies at the University of Buenos Aires, followed by a master’s degree in sustainable environmental design at the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London. Under a triple impact scheme, DUB Arquitectura works together with local communities and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) for some aspects of the construction process, ensuring a positive impact in the location area of each project. They also believe that design is for everyone. Used well, it works as an enabler to an improvement in people's quality of life and contributes to equity. Building well does not necessarily mean building more expensive.

gru.a (group of architects) is a firm led by Caio Calafate and Pedro Varella, based in Rio de Janeiro. Since its establishment in 2013, it has been working on projects and constructions of various scales and types, with a special interest in the intersection between architecture and the visual arts. Alongside their office practice, the partners at gru.a are also engaged in academic research and teaching activities. Over the past several years, gru.a has developed projects and works for cultural centers, artistic installations, theaters, exhibitions, residences, healthcare institutions, and interventions in protected sites, among other initiatives.

Wonne Ickx studied civil engineering and architecture at the University of Ghent, Belgium and urban studies at the Centre for Metropolitan Studies (CEMET) in Guadalajara, Mexico. In 2006, he founded PRODUCTORA in Mexico City, together with Abel Perles, Carlos Bedoya, and Victor Jaime. PRODUCTORA has received many awards for its work, including the prestigious Oscar Niemeyer Prize for Latin American Architecture. Ickx has taught architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of California, Los Angeles, Rice University, and several universities in Mexico, and is currently visiting lecturer at Princeton University. He is cofounder of LIGA-Space for Architecture, an independent platform that promotes Latin American architecture in Mexico City since 2011. He publishes his writing frequently and is part of the editorial board of Arquine, the leading architecture magazine in Latin America, since 2010.

Frida Mouchlian is an architect trained at the Polytechnic University of Madrid (ETSAM), continued her studies at the same university, with a master’s degree in the fundamentals of architecture. She finished her specialization in arts studies in Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico, with a project related to modern Caribbean architecture. Also, she has been an active collaborator of LIGA, becoming the general manager in 2021.

LIGA–Space for Architecture is a nonprofit independent platform founded in Mexico City in 2011 that promotes Latin American contemporary architecture through exhibitions, lectures, and workshops. It was created as a curatorial platform in order to stimulate the experimentation in relation to contemporary architecture and its possibilities as a discursive practice, expanding and establishing connections with other disciplines. With the LIGA ARCHIVOS project LIGA expands its program with a look towards the past. Working in Latin America LIGA realized that there are a number of extremely valuable historical archives that are difficult to access or relatively unknow to a larger audience. In many cases they are family archives, or archives of small foundations with limited resources to disseminate the work in question. Through this initiative LIGA activates and provides public access to the valuable historic material in their possession, by means of a digital platform.