Raúl Cárdenas Osuna Lecture

Raúl Cárdenas Osuna is the founder and director of Torolab, a collective workshop and laboratory of contextual studies that identifies situations or phenomena of interest for research, basing the studies in the realm of lifestyles to better grasp the idea of quality of life. He holds a degree in architecture from the Universidad Iberoamericana in Tijuana as well as a Masters in Fine Arts from the University of California in San Diego.

His work has been shown nationally and internationally at various venues including: MoMA, New York City; the Museum of Modern Art of Louisiana in Denmark; Museum of Contemporary Art of San Diego; LA(X)ART, Los Angeles; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Sydney; the Storefront for Art and Architecture, NYC; Havana Biennial; Liverpool Biennial; Beijing 2004 Biennial of Architecture; Mercosur Biennale, Brazil; and Lyon Biennale, France. His work is in private and public collections such as the Musuem of Contemporary Art of San Diego and the Jumex collection in Mexico. He has received twice The American Center Foundation Award and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant. His work and articles have been published at New York Times, TIME magazine, Harvard’s Political Review, Boston Globe, Surface, Wallpaper, I.D., among others.

He has taught at the Universidad Iberoamericana’s School of Architecture in Mexico; at the San Francisco Art Institute and the California College of Arts in the US; and Université Rennes 2 in France.

In October 2011, Raúl Cárdenas was awarded for best arts-intervention project with social impact by Harvard’s Cultural Agents Initiative and in December has been named Person of the Year by Tijuana’s newspaper ‘Frontera’. Right now, he’s part of a new project at New York’s MoMA entitled: “The Art and Public Initiative”; he directs the non-profit organization ‘Sociedad de Agentes de Cambio A.C.’ and is the director of the Digital table for the Metropolitan Strategic Plan of Tecate-Rosarito-Tijuana, were he currently lives and work.

Torolab is a laboratory of spatial investigations, art and contextual living phenomena, commanded by Raúl Cárdenas Osuna, who creates a work methodology in which, depending on the project, invites people to develop the project with him; all together they become Torolab.

Their main interest lies in proposition and not in protest. And to establish deep relationships between people, ideas, and equipment for life. With their experiments they search for the sublime in everyday life–the DNA of comfort and an atmosphere of warm humanism: to obtain a better quality of life.

Since 1995, all Torolab projects have been created by Raúl Cárdenas Osuna.