With collaborators from across the Great Plains, Sarah Aziz tags, tracks, draws, and builds with tumbleweeds because they defy humanmade borders and ask new questions of indigeneity and invasiveness.

With collaborators from across the Great Plains, Sarah Aziz tags, tracks, draws, and builds with tumbleweeds because they defy humanmade borders and ask new questions of indigeneity and invasiveness. During her talk, she will share her plans to situate the project in the San Luis Valley. In summer 2023, she will orchestrate a series of experimental, interactive building events at the Frontier Drive In/n in Center, CO – a historically significant site for supporting Chicanx realities in rural Colorado – that invites people from the San Luis Valley to collectively make, break, and build together using tumbleweed and dirt. These materials are free, region-specific, and speak to America’s complex legacies of war, technology, immigration, and agriculture.

Sarah Aziz is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of New Mexico. A recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship, she has taught at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she was the 2020-2021 Fitzhugh Scott Innovation in Design Fellow, and the University of Colorado Denver, as the inaugural Visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture with an Emphasis on Issues of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, and Texas Tech University. She holds a B.Arch. from Liverpool John Moores University and an M.Arch. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.