Sétima Trienal de Arquitectura de Lisboa

Kenny Cupers is a Belgian architectural historian and professor at the University of Basel, where he directs the Urban Studies program. His research focuses on architecture, urbanism, and social infrastructures, particularly in modern Europe and post-colonial contexts. Cupers’ interests lie in how design mediates social life and political power. He is the author of The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (2014) and The Earth that Modernism Built (2024), which traces the rise of planetary design to an imperialist discourse about the influence of the earthly environment on humanity. He has also contributed to exhibitions and curatorial projects exploring architecture’s societal and environmental impacts. Cupers’ work often blurs disciplinary boundaries, bridging history, design and critical theory.

Yara Sharif is Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster and co-founder of the Palestine Regeneration Team (PART), a design-led collective grappling with reconstruction, self-build, and spatial justice in Middle Eastern contexts. Her doctoral research (Architecture of Resistance) won the RIBA President’s Award for Research (2013), and she has led award-winning collaborations with Riwaq and NG Architects on Beit Iksa Eco Kitchen and Birzeit regeneration projects. In November 2023, she co-founded Architects for Gaza with Nasser Golzari, mobilizing global design practitioners to partner with displaced communities, reimagining home, memory and collective futures in Gaza through speculative and live-built environments.

Nasser Golzari is an architect, academic, and founding principal of NG Architects and of Architects for Gaza. As Course Leader at University of Westminster, he pursues socially rooted architecture through historical and contemporary research on sustainability, cultural identity, and urban regeneration. Co-founder of PART and of Architects for Gaza, both with Yara Sharif, he works on self-help reconstruction initiatives alongside community-led planning across war-torn landscapes. His award-winning collaborations—including with Riwaq—span sustainable design infrastructure in Palestine and exhibitions across London, Sharjah, Venice and others.

Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography at Queen Mary University of London, where she interrogates the geologies of race, extraction and colonial power through critical environmental humanities. Trained in geography, social theory and feminist philosophy, her research (and her recent book Geologic Life: Inhuman Intimacies and the Geophysics of Race, 2024) surfaces how colonial geology constructs racialized geospatial forms and how Black, Indigenous and Caribbean thought might reimagine planetary subjectivity. She also authored A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2019), and leads work on “planetary portals” to dismantle extractive imaginaries and rethink coexistence across Earth systems.