The IABR 2024: Nature of Hope Curator Team consists of architect and researcher Janna Bystrykh, architect-researcher and philosopher Catherine Koekoek, researcher and writer Hani Salih, spatial designer and researcher Alina Paias, and designer and writer Noortje Weenink. The curator team, whose members come from different backgrounds but share a common basis in spatial design, manifests the change that is already underway.
Janna Bystrykh is an architect and researcher. She is the head of the Master in Architecture program, at the Academy of Architecture Amsterdam, where she is leading the development of a climate curriculum for architecture, and runs her design and research practice BYSTRYKH. Janna Bystrykh has experience with complex urban projects, museum transformations, experimental educational projects and installations. At OMA*AMO she worked on the ‘Elements of Architecture’ exhibition for the 2014 Venice Biennale and on the research and exhibition project Countryside: The Future.
Catherine Koekoek has a background in architecture and philosophy. She is a PhD candidate in Political Philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her dissertation examines how democratic infrastructures – from community centers to the Rotterdams Wijktheater, with which she collaborates – enable democratic coexistence. Together with Veerle Alkemade, Catherine Koekoek produces the feminist architecture podcast Respons.
Hani Salih works as a researcher, designer, writer, editor, and curator. He works across a range of disciplines and practices, from architecture to systems and policy. Hani Salih is interested in the broader contexts in which social and cultural phenomena take place, and is currently exploring this in his work as a lecturer in Architecture and Design, and as a curator of events and debates at De Dépendance in Rotterdam. He is drawn to the built environment’s potential to facilitate and encourage social change on a micro and macro scale and believes that multidisciplinary thinking is the way forward in a complex and interconnected world.
Alina Paias has a background in architecture. She works as a designer, researcher and curator. She immerses herself in feminist philosophy, new materialism, environmental humanities and the philosophy of technology, from which she explores the creation of architecture. Alina Paias works as a spatial designer at CLOUD and as a guest lecturer at Delft University of Technology. In Brazil, she was an assistant curator at RADDA in São Paulo.
Noortje Weenink has been working as a junior curator at the IABR since 2021 and is active as a spatial designer, writer, guest lecturer, and climate activist. Together with Irene Feria Prados, Noortje Weenink runs the design studio Queer(ing) Space at the Rotterdam Academy of Architecture and Urbanism. In her professional and everyday life, she explores how disruptive practices can be used for social and climate justice. At Studio Ossidiana she worked on the winning Prix de Rome project Amsterdam Allegories.
