Hospes is a curatorial and artistic research project that investigates the frictions and affinities between environmental and housing justice organizations in Los Angeles, aiming to spark dialogue, collaboration, and exchange towards just and multispecies futures.
Maya Livio
American University
School of Communication
3D representation of Los Angeles habitats. Courtesy of Maya Livio.
Los Angeles, one of the most diverse and biodiverse urban centers in the world, faces significant challenges related to rapid urbanization, unhoused peoples, climate change, biodiversity loss, and the need for sustainable development. As such, it is home to a rich set of organizations, artists and designers, engaged communities, and activists who center housing justice, conservation, Indigenous land justice, and habitat connectivity across the city’s fractured landscapes. These projects and communities often lack space for dialogue around shared goals and commitments such as habitability and are sometimes even positioned as in false conflict due to scarcity logics.
This project will not only surface the points of friction but particularly highlight the affinities among these groups, make space for conversation, and investigate the organic and technological landscapes in which they operate through research and curation.
I am warmly grateful to the SOM Foundation and the MAK Center for championing multidisciplinary inquiry and for supporting this project on the overlapping urgencies of human and more-than-human thriving in Los Angeles. The support of the Researcher-in-Residence award will enable me to conduct interviews and curate a multi-stakeholder public program to bring together some of the city’s engaged communities working on questions of just habitability and cohabitation. This project will amplify important work already taking place, surface shared values, and cultivate pressing cross-community discussions about what livability can look like.
Maya Livio
Still from "Salvaging Birds," Livio’s feature film about the use of data and technology for avian conservation in Los Angeles. © Maya Livio.
Still from "Salvaging Birds," Livio’s feature film about the use of data and technology for avian conservation in Los Angeles. © Maya Livio.
Maya Livio
American University
School of Communication
probes at the contact zones between ecosystems and technological systems. Her interdisciplinary, justice-oriented work spans research, writing, media-making, and curation, and has been featured in The Washington Post, VICE, Vanity Fair, The Institute of Networked Cultures, and NPR, among others. It has also been supported by venues such as the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Arts, A-Z West, Redline Contemporary Art Center, SUPERCOLLIDER, and Labocine by Imagine Science Films. She commissioned and programmed new media arts as Curator of MediaLive, an annual international festival at Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA) (2015–2020), and commissioned and programmed old media arts as Curator of the Media Archaeology Lab, a collecting institution for historical technologies (2016–2021). In 2023, Livio was awarded the Caltech-Huntington Residency for her project “Salvaging Birds,” a film and set of works on AI-driven conservation through the lens of queer ecology. She was also awarded the 2023 Airlie Research and Innovation Award for undertaking a project at Airlie, the site at which Earth Day was founded. Livio holds a PhD from the University of Colorado, Boulder, MA from the University of Amsterdam, and is Assistant Professor of Climate, Environmental Justice, Media and Communication at American University.
