Agustina Woodgate
About the lecture
In this lecture, Agustina Woodgate reveals the hidden agendas behind the distribution systems that shape our society—from water and currency to radio waves. Through poetic provocations and strategic interventions, loopholes and leakages, she will unpack the politics regulating these systems and instigate aesthetic practitioners to disrupt and redefine them. By hacking, bypassing, and rearranging contracts, Woodgate operates within the gray zones of policy, constructing functional experimental infrastructures that challenge conventions and reimagine spatial design, resource management, and information distribution in site-responsive, thought-provoking ways.
Bio
Agustina Woodgate is an artist, radio producer, and spatial designer exploring the politics of critical infrastructures as a conceptual and public geography. Her work investigates systems, the standardisation of space, representations of value, and the design logics that shape the built environment and, in turn, society. She is particularly interested in how tools and information technologies reprogram territories and how art and design can influence these evolving landscapes. Viewing infrastructure as the visible embodiment of geopolitical interests that govern natural and common resources, she examines its impact on social and ecological systems.
Woodgate’s installations, interventions, and exhibitions function as experimental infrastructures, developed through interdisciplinary collaboration with engineers, scientists, architects, geologists, anthropologists, electricians, plumbers, and urban planners, among others. This collaborative process is integral to her conceptual methodology, fostering a critical exchange of knowledge while challenging conventional systems. By reimagining existing formats and mechanisms, her work transforms art spaces into platforms for prototyping alternative futures.
Through a speculative yet pragmatic approach that is site- and context-responsive, Woodgate’s infrastructures offer new perspectives on social structures, resource management, and information distribution. Her work seeks to enhance clarity, scale, and accessibility, creating functional systems that propose innovative ways of organising and understanding our shared environments.
Her work has been included in exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum, Massachusetts; 2024; Stroom den Haag, Netherlands, 2024; 12th Seoul MediaCity Biennial, 2023; BIENALSUR 2021; 2019 Whitney Biennial, New York; IX Berlin Biennial; IV Istanbul Design Biennial; New Terrains, The Bay Area; Bienal de las Américas, Denver; PlayPublik, PolandDC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, Washington, DC; The Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Art in Public Places, Miami; and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin among others. Her permanent public works can be found in Crans Montana, Switzerland; ArOmi Sculpture Park, New York; Miami-Dade County sidewalks and Quilmes Park, Buenos Aires.
She lives and works between Amsterdam and Buenos Aires.
