Mariana Pestana, is an architect and curator, living and working between London and Lisbon. Her work is informed by an interest in architecture and fiction. She makes exhibitions and installations that enact fictional scenarios and programmes, so that many people can experience them together.
In 2011, she co-founded a collective called The Decorators, with whom she developed curatorial and research projects through interventions in the public realm.
She was a lecturer in Spatial Design at Central Saint Martins and Chelsea College of Arts, and in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Arts. At the moment She is part of the teaching team of the University of the Underground at Sandberg Institute, and She is completing a PhD called Fictional World Enactments at the Bartlett School of Architecture.
She was co-curating an exhibition called The Future Starts Here for the V&A (Victoria and Albert Museum) that opened in May 2018. This was a an exhibition about emerging technologies and the ways in which they are already affecting our future at a range of scales: as individuals, as citizens and as a species. She was also co-curating an exhibition for MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology) which opened to the public in April 2018, in Lisbon, called Eco-Visionaries: Art and Architecture After the Anthropocene. Divided into four moments of ecological awareness - Disaster, Confluence, Extinction and Adaptation - it displays work by contemporary artists and architects that capture subjective, fluctuating, unstable images of ecology.
She will be curator of the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial will take place on 26 September – 8 November 2020.
