Sonia Sobrino Ralston (she/her) is a spatial practitioner and researcher. Broadly, her interests lie in how landscape and architecture intersect with geopolitics and the history of technology. Her current projects focus on understanding how regimes historically attempted to establish control over landscapes using environmental media, and the alternative and dissenting systems that respond to them. Sonia recently graduated with distinction from the Harvard Graduate School of Design with a Master in Landscape Architecture, where she won the Digital Design Prize, the Landscape Architecture Thesis Prize, and the Norman T. Newton Prize. She also holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton University where she also received a certificate in Media and Modernity, and was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize. Beyond this, she has worked as anassistant curator, research assistant, teaching assistant, architectural designer, exhibition designer, data visualizer, publication editor, and graphic designer at various institutions and organizations focused on spatial concerns.
Selected Work
01. Design
Utilizing Power
Directing Domains
Between 1-549
Assembly
02. Installation
Garden Party
03. Professional
metaLAB at Harvard︎︎︎
01. Design
Waste to GovernanceLOT ###
Utilizing Power
Directing Domains
Between 1-549
Assembly
02. Installation
Garden Party
03. Professional
Assistant Curator, 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale︎︎︎Design Collaborator,
metaLAB at Harvard︎︎︎
Assembly
Fall 2019
Princeton SoA Architecture
Professors Cristina Díaz Moreno and Efrén García Grinda
Speculative Archive for Demonstrations
The project combines a visual archive and nomadic artefacts which together produce a space for political praxis. Sited in Brooklyn, New York, is comprised of both static and non-static parts as an opportunity to provide adaptable and moveable spaces for the planning, documentation, and reception of the contemporary protest. Sited in Greenpoint, New York, the former site of an oil refinery provides the physical structure for a stable archive, and the interstitial spaces between them provide a figurative and literal rallying point for public demonstrations occurring across the city. The nomadic structures, though part of the space for political assembly, can be distributed across the city to call attention to not only to large, highly publicized direct action, but also small, less visible protests. In short, the project intends to bring visibility, literally and figuratively, to struggle in New York City.
This project intends to both serve as tools to capture and facilitate demonstrators as well as a repository for subjective experiences of demonstrations. The visual apparatuses used to capture struggle and the organization of protests has become increasingly facilitated by ubiquitous personal technologies, that is, cell phones. Playing on this ubiquity, the project aims to encourage individual users as well as utilizing the artefacts to help document the experience of the protest visually. The captures would be uploaded and
The project combines a visual archive and nomadic artefacts which together produce a space for political praxis. Sited in Brooklyn, New York, is comprised of both static and non-static parts as an opportunity to provide adaptable and moveable spaces for the planning, documentation, and reception of the contemporary protest. Sited in Greenpoint, New York, the former site of an oil refinery provides the physical structure for a stable archive, and the interstitial spaces between them provide a figurative and literal rallying point for public demonstrations occurring across the city. The nomadic structures, though part of the space for political assembly, can be distributed across the city to call attention to not only to large, highly publicized direct action, but also small, less visible protests. In short, the project intends to bring visibility, literally and figuratively, to struggle in New York City.
This project intends to both serve as tools to capture and facilitate demonstrators as well as a repository for subjective experiences of demonstrations. The visual apparatuses used to capture struggle and the organization of protests has become increasingly facilitated by ubiquitous personal technologies, that is, cell phones. Playing on this ubiquity, the project aims to encourage individual users as well as utilizing the artefacts to help document the experience of the protest visually. The captures would be uploaded and
accessed in the archive, where converted oil storage tanks would serve as contemporary panoramas to observe and access material in the archive. The physical space of the archive may grow as more political perceptions are uploaded, creating a visual representation of the complexity and density of opinions imbued in the space of a protest.
The project’s artefacts also intend, beyond their purposes as capturing technologies, to serve as visual and cartographic beacons. The tall structures interspersed around the city create an immediate visual cue that protest is occurring, but also cut through digital space to act as a cartographic beacon. For example, one of the artefacts will include a tall visual beacon on which protest signs can be hanged to offer a moving billboard for protest messages, ie: analog vision. The other artefacts will include a telecommunications tower to allow for more cellphone service to enable increased documentation of the protest. The mixing of analog and digital documentations of the space of protest therefore offer a larger opportunity to capture varying political opinions, intents, and struggles using the artefacts and space of political assembly.
The project’s artefacts also intend, beyond their purposes as capturing technologies, to serve as visual and cartographic beacons. The tall structures interspersed around the city create an immediate visual cue that protest is occurring, but also cut through digital space to act as a cartographic beacon. For example, one of the artefacts will include a tall visual beacon on which protest signs can be hanged to offer a moving billboard for protest messages, ie: analog vision. The other artefacts will include a telecommunications tower to allow for more cellphone service to enable increased documentation of the protest. The mixing of analog and digital documentations of the space of protest therefore offer a larger opportunity to capture varying political opinions, intents, and struggles using the artefacts and space of political assembly.
