Space Strategies

Roberto Uribe-Castro is a Colombian-born architect and visual artist based in Berlin.

His work may begin with careful attention to the immediate surroundings. A discarded bottle on the street, a forgotten subway station, the red-and-white tape that usually marks a construction site, a feather found in the city or a monument that has become almost invisible may become the starting point of a project. At other times, a newspaper article, a visit to an archive or a museum collection may trigger a new line of inquiry. These initial observations gradually intertwine with archival research, historical documents and fieldwork, allowing the place itself to reveal the multiple histories embedded within it.

Working across installation, sculpture, public space interventions, video and collaborative research, Uribe-Castro displaces and recontextualises materials, objects and situations, allowing the historical processes they contain to become visible. His projects begin with the histories already embedded in architecture, public space and everyday material culture, establishing a dialogue with the places in which they unfold.

This is how Roberto understands architecture: not simply as the production of space, but as the cultural structure through which societies organise collective memory and rituals, construct territories and produce systems of representation. Close observation, fieldwork and archival research form the basis of each project, allowing local histories to resonate with broader geopolitical realities. Rather than understanding history as a linear sequence of completed events, his work approaches it as a continuous process whose consequences remain in active dialogue with the present.

Whether working with urban debris, industrial materials, museum collections or temporary interventions in public space, Roberto Uribe approaches places as living archives. His work is grounded in the conviction that historical processes remain physically present in the spaces, objects and infrastructures that surround us.