Satellite Citizens brings together Dimensions of Citizenship participants and catalog essayists to discuss the past, present, and future of technology and space exploration. Who is excluded and included when we gaze upward to the cosmos or delve deep into the network? Panelists include writer Ingrid Burrington, Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy of the collaborative practice Design Earth, and Fred Scharmen. Moderated by Jonathan Solomon, director of the Department of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects at School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

This event is presented concurrently with the Chicago presentation of the Graham funded exhibition Dimensions of Citizenship: Architecture and Belonging from the Body to the Cosmos, a reinstallation of the official US Pavilion at the 16th International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, at Wrightwood 659, which runs from February 28 through April 27, 2019.

Ingrid Burrington writes about the Internet, politics, and art, and has been published in The Atlantic, The Nation, ProPublica, San Francisco Art Quarterly, Dissent, and elsewhere. She’s given talks at conferences both in the US and abroad, and her art has been exhibited in galleries in New York, Tokyo, Leipzig, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and many other cities.

Led by Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy, Design Earth examines the geographies of urban systems—such as energy, trash, water, and agriculture—to prompt the debate on the techno-environment in the age of climate change. The design research practice has exhibited its works at the Venice Biennale and other leading international architecture events and has received numerous accolades, including the Young Architects Prize from the Architectural League of New York. Their After Oil project was collected by The Museum of Modern Art. Ghosn and Jazairy each hold Doctor of Design degrees from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where they founded the journal New Geographies and were the respective editors for NG2: Landscapes of Energy and NG4: Scales of the Earth. They have authored numerous books, including the Graham Foundation grant-supported Geostories (Actar, 2018) and Geographies of Trash (Actar, 2015) as well as recent essays and projects published in Domus, Journal of Architectural Education, Avery Review, and Perspecta, among others. Ghosn is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture + Planning, and Jazairy is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.

Fred Scharmen teaches architecture and urban design at Morgan State University's School of Architecture and Planning. His work as a designer and researcher is about how architects imagine new spaces for new speculative future worlds, and about who is invited into those worlds. His most recently completed projects, with the Working Group on Adaptive Systems, include a mile-and-a-half long scale model of the solar system in downtown Baltimore (in collaboration with nine artists who made the planets), and a pillow fort for the Baltimore Museum of Art, based on Gottfried Semper's Four Elements of Architecture. His writing has been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Log, CLOG, Volume, and Domus. His architectural criticism has appeared in the Architect’s Newspaper, and in the local alt-weekly Baltimore City Paper.

Jonathan Solomon is associate professor and director of Architecture, Interior Architecture, and Designed Objects at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His drawings, analytical and counterfactual urban narratives, appear in Cities Without Ground (ORO, 2012), and 13 Projects for the Sheridan Expressway (PAPress, 2004). Solomon edits Forty-Five, a journal of outside research, and was curator of the US Pavilion at the 2010 Venice Architecture Biennale. His interests include extra-disciplinary, post-growth, and nonanthroponormative design futures. Solomon received a BA from Columbia University and an MArch from Princeton University and is a licensed architect in the State of Illinois.

Related Graham Foundation supported projects:

2018 grant to the School of the Art Institute Of Chicago & The University of Chicago for Dimensions of Citizenship: US Pavilion, 16th International Architecture Exhibition

2017 grant to Rania Ghosn and El Hadi Jazairy for the publication Geostories

Image: Cosmorama by Design Earth at the 2018 U.S. Pavilion. Photo © Tom Harris. Courtesy of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Chicago.