VASE LECTURES

Thursday, February 25, 2027, 5:30 pm
Center for Creative Photography

Spatial Solidarities at Dawson Island, 1889 & 1973

Dawson Island, located in the southern edge of Chile, was the site of a detention and torture center for political prisoners of the Pinochet dictatorship, the regime that violently took over the country in 1973. One century before, the island was used for an Indigenous internment center, meant to isolate the nomad groups that inhabited the broader archipelago and turn their land over to lucrative cattle ranches.

In this lecture, Ana María León will examine the similarities between the settler colonial Chilean state at the end of the nineteenth century and the dictatorship of the late twentieth century, as well as the spatial forms of solidarity mobilized by the individuals imprisoned by this regime in order to resist its violence and reclaim their agency.

About the artist

Ana María León‘s work traces spatial practices and transnational networks of power, resistance, and solidarity. She is an associate professor of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. León is co-founder of several collaborations laboring to broaden the reach of architectural history, including The Settler Colonial City Project and Nuestro Norte es el Sur.

Her work has been published in multiple journals and essay collections. She is author of “Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires” (2021) and “A Ruin in Reverse / Bones of the Nation” (2021). Her newest book is titled “Spatial Solidarities: Architecture and Resistance in 1970s Chile (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2026).

León, previously an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, holds a PhD in the History, Theory and Criticism of Architecture from MIT, a Master in Design Studies with distinction from Harvard, a Master in Architecture from Georgia Tech, and a diploma in architecture from UCSG Ecuador.

• Harvard bio: gsd.harvard.edu/person/ana-maria-leon-crespo
• Instagram: @anamarialeoncrespo

and the Decolonizing Design Pedagogies grant

2026-2027 Visiting Artists