Residency Period Spring 2015
METASITU was founded in early 2014 by Eduardo Cassina and Liva Dudareva, at the time urban researchers at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow. Born with the goal of expanding the discussions surrounding the inhabitation of the territory to different and wider audiences, at METASITU we look for means of storytelling that reveal our urban investigation through different prisms. Our practice is research-based and highly mobile, relying on the transnational networks, virtual and physical, where we draw our inspiration and fascination from, but also where we unfold our nomadic existence.
Liva Dudareva, born in 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, born in 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.