ARTIST STATEMENT

METASITU is a strategic art collective and urban consultancy founded by Eduardo Cassina and Liva Dudareva. Our expertise is contemporary and future urban challenges, which we address through our research-based practice. Our medium is video, performance and installation. In METASITU the urban fabric is our point of interest: the different fibres that weave it, the social and communal layers, the built matrix and the infinite networks that traverse it. From this departure point, our intention is to dissect the inhabited territory and bring architectural and urban sociological research to a wider audience through art in order to bridge the gap that currently exists separating urbanites from a global understanding of their immediate surroundings.

BIOGRAPHY

Liva Dudareva (Jelgava/Latvia, 1984) was trained as a landscape architect in Latvia and Sweden, before moving to London to work as a researcher at CHORA. She then continued her studies in landscape architecture at the Edinburgh College of Art, before joining the award-winning landscape architecture firm Gross.Max in Scotland, where she worked conceptualising, developing and managing projects world-wide. She then moved to Moscow to explore new ways of representation and urban research at the Strelka Institute. She co-founded METASITU, an art collective and urban consultancy devoted to the exploration of future tactics.  

Eduardo Cassina (Móstoles/Spain, 1986) is an architect and urban sociologist trained in the United Kingdom, Portugal, The Netherlands and China. He has worked as a researcher and exhibition designer for the Guggenheim museums in Venice and New York, as well as for the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi). After working as an urban researcher for Goldsmiths, where he developed new methodologies to visualise the sociological phenomenon of Chinese commercial landscapes in Southern Africa, he moved to Moscow to join the Strelka Institute, where he continued his exploration of representation of urban data in new and innovative ways. In 2014 he co-founded METASITU.