Tell us about your time at Edinburgh College of Art
In 2008 I was fortunate to receive an Erasmus scholarship to undertake a one-year exchange course at ECA. I attended the Masters course in Architecture and the Arts.
As a student from a traditional architecture school, becoming part of the creative community of ECA made a big impact on me and my practice. There I learnt that encounters between both disciplines of my interest and passion, art and architecture, were possible.
Tell us about your creative practice
Trained as both an architect and an artist, my practice expands the conventions of art, architecture, and technology to envision alternate ways of being and inhabiting the world. My current work lies in the dynamics of social encounters in built space. Increasingly, the library - where encounters happen through the medium of the book - has become the focus of my research.
In 2014, I started the My Bookcase project, a social enterprise initiating and supporting creative projects that take the book as a source for both research and practice. My Bookcase approaches the book not as a hermetic object, but one that can be deconstructed and explored through art, architecture, design and literature, as well as with communities beyond these fields.
The main project of the organisation is the My Bookcase Platform, a new online service where to catalogue and share the contents of your bookshelves, create reading lists for specific projects, discover new titles by browsing the online collections and connect with fellow readers in your community to borrow books.
My Bookcase actively involves others as both participants and co-creators in the realisation of projects, facilitating a platform through which to analyse the new circumstances that the public library faces as an institution and what this creative investigation can bring to society.
What did you like about your time at ECA?
What I recall as very important from my time at ECA is to suddenly be surrounded by a community of like-minded creative people with whom to share my interests. All students were supported by the Architecture and the Arts tutors, who really encouraged us to go out of the architecture boundaries in order to discover new ways of doing things. It was fun and fresh, and I guess Edinburgh as a city was the perfect playground for us.
