open call: architect in residence

Eight stone houses. Two hectares of forest. A village that time left behind.

O Castro de Mourelos is an abandoned rural settlement in the Ribeira Sacra region of Galicia; one of the most biologically and culturally dense landscapes in northwestern Spain. The stone houses stand in varying states of ruin. The forest grows around and through them. The place holds memory in its walls, its moss, its silence.

We are inviting one architect to come and think with us.

This is not a commission to rebuild. It is an invitation to look, to measure, to imagine, and to produce a spatial intervention study that asks: what could this place become, without erasing what it has been?

Working alongside filmmaker and artistic director Davoud Gerami, the principle architect Oscar López Alba from Ola Estudio, and in close dialogue with the other resident artists, you will develop a research-based architectural proposal for the site. The work may engage with questions of ruin, history, tradition, habitation, or ecological repair. We strongly encourage the use of reclaimed and native materials as the basis for any proposed interventions.

Your outcome will be a documented spatial intervention proposal; drawings, models, notes, or any format native to your practice that will remain as part of O Castro’s permanent research archive and inform the future of the site.