ALBERTO ORTEGA-TREJO
Artist, researcher and architectural designer.
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His work uses architecture,
drawing, sculpture, writing and video to explore histories of indigeneity in architectural
modernity, the production of extreme environments, the spatial politics of the colonial encounters in North America and the architectures of social experiments. He has been
an IDEAS Fellow of the Society of Architectural Historians and a grantee of Jumex
Foundation for Contemporary Art, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and DCASE,
among others. His work has been shown at Prairie, DePaul Art Museum, BienalSur, Ca’ Foscari
Zattere, Rhona Hoffman Gallery, Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Uri-Eichen Gallery, SpaceP11, and Centro de Arte y Filosofía. He has been a guest speaker for institutions and
organizations like the American Institute
of Architects, the Society of Architectural Historians, Smart Museum of Art, Committee on Environment Geography and Urbanization, DocTalks x MoMA, Materia
Abierta, UPenn, MAS Context and CENTRO.
He has taught Architectural History and Studio at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and he served as Program Manager of the Katz Center for Mexican Studies at the University of Chicago from 2021 to 2026. Ortega-Trejo is currently a PhD student in Architectural History and Theory at Princeton University.
ARTIFICIAL-AGENCY
Architectural Consultancy
Exhibition Strategy
Research and Publication
Previous clients and collaborators include, Public Media Institute, North East Asia Art Archive, Art Institute of Chicago, Singapore Art Museum, Edith Farnsworth House, Goethe-Institut Chicago, Michael Rakowitz Studio, Black Athena Collective, Dawit L. Petros, and Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at The University of Chicago.
Keep scrolling for selected projects ↆ
Mechanics of Labor Control
On law and religious language
Texts and diagram
This project explores religious and legal language to question and blur the notion of truth, testimony and history. A diagram traces back in time the agents and events that lead to the accidental death of an indigenous worker in a construction site in the 1970’s at the Mezquital Valley, in Mexico. A looping video of repurposed footage shows images of workers of the Valley precariously balancing and sliding down a steel column.
Based on the testimonials collected by Paul Leduc in his documentary Ethnocide: Notes on the Mezquital.
This piece was exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, in Ca’ Foscari Zattere. “Exploring Belonging”, a collective exhibition by SAIC in response to the US Pavilion theme: Dimensions of Citizenship.