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Cayetano Ferrer

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Cayetano Ferrer is a Doctoral Student in Historic Preservation at Columbia GSAPP. His research examines preservation as an interpretive practice, exploring how conservation methods, as part of a larger institutional apparatus, shape cultural memory and meaning-making around fragmentary objects and built environments. Working at the intersection of artistic practice and preservation, he is particularly interested in the authorial dimensions of conservation work, and in the spaces where the methodologies of practitioners and artists overlap.

Through a studio practice that directly engages the material and conceptual territory of preservation, Cayetano independently salvages architectural fragments from demolition sites and employs techniques such as infilling and reconstruction as modes of speculative practice. Object Prosthetics, supported by a LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant, examines the creative agency embedded in institutional conservation through a series of experimental interventions with museum objects. Extraction, an ongoing project centered on structural elements salvaged from the 1965 William Pereira–designed LACMA building, extends this inquiry into questions of architectural heritage and the cultural narratives that adhere to building remains. He received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his MFA from the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California. He has taught seminars on conservation theory, digital fabrication and visual semiotics at UCLA, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and CalArts, and has exhibited at venues including the Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo; Swiss Institute, New York; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles.