BSc Earth Scientist (National Autonomous University of Mexico)
Elena is a PhD student at the Department of History and Philosophy of Sciences at the University of Cambridge, working on The history and heritage of the discovery of environmental change and the interpretation of place in the East of England. She teaches Histories and Theories and Policy Design seminars at the Landscape Urbanism MSc and MArch programme at the Architectural Association. She worked at Groundlab Research Residency at the Architectural Association, where she conducted semi quantitative and qualitative studies on environmental vulnerability in Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and the UK in collaboration with the British Geological Survey, the University College of London, and the British Council. She has taught in the Mexico Visiting School at the AA, at the Royal College of Art, and at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Her work focuses on the verticality of territories, its imaginaries, epistemologies, and disciplinarian tensions in relationship to contemporary design praxis. Her research work is situated in the interstices between soil sciences, geology, collaborative ethnography, its imaginaries and materialities.
Her work beyond academia is situated in community approaches through soil and land management. These collaborations take place within London, South East Wales, and the periphery of Mexico City. These collaborations unfold as cartographies, archives, and other media.
Research & Design
Soil Health Clinic London
Patlachique common lands and ecologies
Architectural Association Landscape Urbanism tutor
Royal College of Art Environmental Architecture studio tutor
Decentralised Water Solutions for Mexico City and its Metropolitan Area
Field Office Workshop 1
Infográficos de campamentos en riesgo en Chile
Just Transition: the (Un)intended consequences of Greening
WritingsArchitectural Design. Just Transition: Rewiring Carbon-Pollutant Landscapes and Labour into a Community Forestry Framework.
World Landscape Architects. Landscape architecture Insights | The next generation | Part 3 – Our Future Woodlands
AArchitecure 46. The Commodification of Carbon: a Paradox in Scotland’s Peatlands
Exhibitions
2024 Oxford Real Farming Conference: Agroecological Futures Through Landscape Urbanism
2020 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture Shenzhen Biennale
Like an orange skin, like a wet otter:
The history of the British
Quaternary chronologies through East Anglian places
2026 - Ongoing
History and Philosophy of Science Department
University of Cambridge
The first part of my research was developed accross the Cambridge University Library collections and Cambridge scientists oral histories composing the registers of the Quaternary scientific development of the mid 20th century. It looks at the way in which terrestrial sediments were formed and transformed by glaciations and deglaciations of the past 1.5 million years (mid Pleistocene). The cyclical movement of ice sheets and the ecological successions transformed and eroded a great part of the Pleistocene record, leaving isolated sediment deposits across the boreal regions. The Cambridge Scientists interpreted and correlated regional events with North European findings to name and classify the geological events of the Pleistocene into what the Quaternary scientist defined as British Stages.
By looking at pollen grain shapes, metaphors of their textures, coastal cross sections, site profiles, graphs, and cartoons, I compose the development of knowledge between the disciplines of geology, geomorphology, and palynology and how they provide partial perspectives of local histories with global implications.
This work is centred in the interdisciplinary work from the Subdepartment of Quaternary Research in Cambridge from 1950 to 1985 and the visual cultures produced by well recognised Quaternary scientists like Richard West and other less recognised or unpublished works from the geomorphologist George Slater, the palaeobotanist Suzanne Duigan, and the palynologist Robin Andrew.