Resident

Pat Vera is an architect, designer, researcher and educator whose work focuses in incorporating Indigenous knowledge and alternative epistemologies into land-based design and pedagogy as a way of building sustainable futures with practices that already manifested in an equitable, respectful and balanced relationship with the earth.

Pat’s current research promotes the Pluriverse as the space in which to converse among different worldviews, creating community-oriented design practices that can work towards healing from the systemic damage caused by the colonial matrix of domination.

In her practice, Pat brings in her own background from Paraguay with the Guarani peoples’ cosmovision and the native Guarani language that she speaks as a way to recognize her own “borderlands”: those cultural borders that she redefines as intersectional margins, where the racialized view of capitalist and modernist societies define and delimit geographies and cultural identities, creating oppression, discrimination and marginalization.

For Pat, recognizing our own positionality in the world makes us recognize the others in their own opening the space for a Pluriverse world where different ways of being and knowing can build community and transform realities of exclusion, racism, social and ecological distress into possibilities of change.

Pat’s research work is available at: patvera.ca