We are De Manera Isleña
Informed by our lived experience, the name is a call for more just, collective and interconnected ways of living, working, building, thinking, imagining, producing, educating, and caring.
Connected through work and companionship, De Manera Isleña came together in 2023 to collaborate and help envision more equitable and inclusive visions in response to the hierarchical and agonistic urban/rural contexts in archipelagic and diasporic communities.
Our practice examines, facilitates, and participates in grassroots, mutual-aid strategies of place/home-making that challenge the dominant views and narratives shaping our built environment and ecologies. De Manera Isleña engages in iterative forms of politically and culturally informed design through community-led initiatives and interdisciplinary collaboration.
We are a social art and design practice dedicated to discussing, exposing, and analyzing the complex cultural/spatial relationships and interdependencies of island being, as it relates to an already changed climate and how we participate in our shared world through indigenizing methods for post-colonial, anti-imperialist, and anti-racist imaginaries.
Our practice materializes through four core venues:
01
Participating in pro-bono activist projects that use design as a tool for resilient community planning and social justice advocacy.
02
Engaging in academia, research, and architectural theory to discuss anti-racist and anti-colonial models of design education and practice.
03
Prototyping spatial interventions that engage public education and reclaim public space through collective and emancipatory planning.
04
Writing and publishing focused on cultural preservation, community building, and equitable design and planning practices.