Ersela Kripa: “Fronts”

Ersela Kripa

Fronts

Ersela Kripa

Ersela Kripa is an Assistant Professor and Acting Director at Texas Tech College of Architecture (CoA) – El Paso, and Director of Projects at POST (Project for Operative Spatial Technologies), a CoA research center. Ersela is a registered architect and founding partner of AGENCY. Her awards include the Rome Prize in Architecture and the Emerging Voices award from The Architectural League of New York, among others. Ersela holds a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University GSAPP. Born and raised under communist dictatorship in Albania, Ersela’s work is particularly focused on uncovering the machinations of the securocratic regimes that surveil and control public lives.

AGENCY is design and research practice which leverages spatial design and spatial information to counteract nascent forms of global and urban insecurity. From the practice’s position on the US–Mexico border, AGENCY’s work reveals and enacts emerging publics. Working in protracted, conflictual contexts, the practice consistently shifts the narrative, developing targeted methods to identify, appropriate, and subvert subperceptual urban and atmospheric events that violate human rights. AGENCY’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Hong Kong–Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale for Architecture and Urbanism, the Venice Biennale, the Berlin Biennale, Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, and the Richmond Art Center.

Kripa’s recent book FRONTS: Military Urbanisms and the Developing World (AR+D, 2020), co-authored with Stephen Mueller, compiles original urban research and analysis, revealing a growing geography of codependence between the global security complex and the urban morphologies of the developing world which it increasingly incriminates.