Who’s in town?
Marina Otero Verzier

Walk-in Cinema

Data Mourning focuses on Tuvalu, a Pacific island nation threatened by rising sea levels, whose government has announced plans to create a digital nation by transferring aspects of its existence to the cloud. 

In this performance lecture, architect and researcher Marina Otero Verzier will examine the tensions between digital preservation and the extractive infrastructures of Big Tech. What does it mean to preserve a nation through technologies that threaten the very environments and relations that sustain life? What is lost when embodied knowledge, cultural heritage, and collective memory are translated into data? And can the infrastructural remaking of a nation offer possibilities beyond the promise of digital survival?

This free-admission program will be held in English and is open to everyone.

Marina Otero Verzier is a Lecturer in Architecture at Harvard Graduate School of Design and leads the “Data Mourning” clinic at Columbia GSAPP. In 2022, she received Harvard’s Wheelwright Prize for her research on the future of data centers. Previously, she directed the MA in Social Design at Design Academy Eindhoven and served as the founding Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. She has co-edited Automated Landscapes (2023), Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), More-than-Human (2020), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), and After Belonging (2016), among other publications, and curated exhibitions including Wet Dreams (2024), Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains (2023), Work, Body, Leisure, the Dutch Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), and Opera Aperta, presented at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale (2025), which received a jury mention. Her recent artistic work includes the award-winning prototype and film Computational Compost. She has co-directed several films with Manuel Correa, including Building for Quantum (2025) and When the Water Ends (2026).