HOMO FABER: Digital fabrication Latin America CAAD Futures 2015 > the next city

Abstract

The Exhibition “Homo Faber: Digital Fabrication in Latin America” is an event related to the CAAD Futures 16th Conference, “The Next City”. The proposal to support this exhibition responds to the need to grasp more widely the Latin American digital fabrication context linked to the field of architecture. This was a rich and challenging process of capturing an ever changing scenario. Mapping, as Janet Abrams and Peter Hall remember us, “has emerged in the information age as a means to make the complex accessible, the hidden visible, the unmappable mappable (…) mapping refers to a process – ongoing, incomplete and of indeterminate, mutable form.” (Else/where: mapping. New cartographies of networks and territories, 2006) Our mapping highlights a recent context of starting and development of fab labs in Latin America. Beginning in university research centers, and consolidated in university platforms, this movement expands with the formation of laboratory networks and the emergence of studios and independent researchers investigating and exploring new uses for digital fabrication in architecture and in related fields.