Catherine Lie

Catherine Anabella Lie is an Indonesian interdisciplinary artist, architect, researcher, educator, and baker based in Mexico City. Interested in the notion of commoning, her work explores the entanglements between the built environment and ecology, drawing on indigenous epistemologies and transmedia storytelling.

Traversing between scores, videos, texts and their 2D/3D translations, she explores alternative histories against the dominant
narrative structure. Using commonly found materials—DIY treatments, wild facts, and everyday languages, she weaves themes
of interdependence, mutual intergenerational care, ecology, cyclical time and animacy in contexts like hospitality, pedagogical
experiments, and public places to reveal oft-repressed voices in our built environment. In her participatory work, she
collaborates with human/ non-human/ more-than-human ghosts in everyday life: stuffed animals that play with kinship and identity formation, a broken phone that broadcasts the invisible story of global copper mining operations, and sourdough starter as a pedagogical lens for design and ecology.

Catherine graduated with a Master of Architecture from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, focusing on culturally-sensitive design, where she was awarded the Fialkow Fellowship for her thesis sourdough architecture, (2020). Her work has been featured at Galerija Kolektiv, Wiesner Gallery, Venice Architecture Biennale, Sakiya, Museum MACAN, A.I.R Gallery, Salón ACME, and KLA Art Festival, among others. Beyond exhibiting internationally, she has also contributed to site-responsive
socio-ecological design and research projects across the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the MENA region.

Currently, she is exploring sourdough architecture as both a linguistic and architectural experiment at La Casa Encendida,
Paisanaje, and CACiS in Spain.