Jorge Valiente Oriol

Jorge Valiente Oriol is an architect, educator and co-founding member of GRANDEZA STUDIO, currently appointed as Adjunct Fellow at the University of Technology Sydney, School of Architecture. His work hybridises critical spatial practice, exhibition design and trans-disciplinary pedagogy to expose the epistemic and territorial violences embedded in extractive landscapes.

Education & Scholarships

• M. Arch, Madrid Polytechnic School of Architecture (ETSAM), 2013 – Final thesis: Multiscale Strategies to Reactivate Transhumance in Spain
• Special Diploma in Territorial & Urban Planning, ETSAM
• Exchange scholarships at Technical University of Architecture (TU) & School of Fine Arts (UDK), Berlin, 2008
• Guest researcher, Bauhaus Lab, Dessau, 2013 – exhibited Atlas of Realities, Sagunto

Research Interests

Valiente Oriol’s research interrogates ‘out-of-sightedness’—the deliberate concealment of ecological, colonial and geopolitical violence within hegemonic spatial narratives. Operating across architecture, performance and visual culture, he develops speculative cartographies that render visible latent territorial disputes, from the Pilbara mining frontier to Korean artificial-reef borders. His recent installations and essays translate field evidence into multimedia allegories, inviting audiences to re-imagine liveable planetary futures beyond extractive logics.

Publications & Exhibition Trends

Since 2017 the corpus clusters around three entangled themes: (1) extractive geographies—analysing mining, reef-urbanism and fossil politics in Australia and South-East Asia; (2) climate spectacle—critiquing governmental green-washing through exhibition devices (Milan Triennale, Venice Biennale collateral); and (3) post-liberal urbanism—mapping neoliberal fatigue in port cities such as Valparaíso. Visual essays, co-authored with GRANDEZA STUDIO, consistently fuse architectural drawing, performance stills and critical text to operate simultaneously as scholarship and curatorial activism.

Grants & Research Support

• The Plant – Contract research grant, New Landscapes Institute, May–July 2017 (with A. Sánchez-Velasco & G. Valiente-Oriol)
• Multiple Spanish national mobility scholarships for study at TU-Berlin, UDK-Berlin and Bauhaus Dessau Foundation

Creative & Collaborative Practice

GRANDEZA STUDIO functions as an itinerant research atelier whose outputs oscillate between peer-reviewed journals and internationally curated exhibitions. Notable productions include the Australian pavilion at the XXII Milan Triennale (2019), the Pilbara Interregnum installation for the 18th Venice Architecture Biennale (2023), and the forthcoming book Teatro della terra alienata (Bartlebooth, 2022). These projects position the collective as both critical interlocutor and practical respondent to climate collapse, colonial extractivism and crises of political imagination.