Architect, artist and educator, Tania López Winkler was born in Celaya, Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1976. Based in London, she explores the intersection of architecture, art and performance through alter-egos such as Hilanda, the 'Spatial Private Detective'. Her work spans installation, photography and teaching at the Royal College of Art, where she leads the superMATTER platform.
Architect, artist and educator, Tania López Winkler was born in Celaya, Guanajuato, Mexico, in 1976. She first trained in architecture at the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) in Mexico before moving to London, where she completed her MA in Housing and Urbanism from the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA). There, she pursued both professional and academic study, completing her doctoral research with a thesis entitled The Detective of Modern Life. This study examined the fictional figure of the private detective as a conceptual tool, framing the ‘clue’ as a semiotic device through which the hidden narratives of modernity could be deciphered.
López Winkler’s practice is characterised by its combination of architectural research, artistic experimentation and the inventive use of alter-egos. Her projects frequently explore the threshold between the domestic interior and the city, interrogating how notions of modernity and ‘the normal’ are materialised and represented. She often turns her attention to the absurd, the marginal and the everyday, seeking to uncover the poetic imperfections and latent fantasies that inhabit the ordinary fabric of life. In doing so, she positions herself as what she has described as a ‘detective of the domestic’ (Periferia), a role that allows her to analyse, reframe and reimagine spatial experience. Central to this approach is her use of multiple personae. Adopting identities such as Hilanda, the ‘Spatial Private Detective’; YoPhoinix (formerly YoMera); Tanexis, a superhero poet and performer; and Liselottl, the eagle warrior who protects childhood dreams, she transforms her own role as an artist and architect. Each character enables her to question cultural norms, blur disciplinary boundaries, and embody different ways of navigating the city. Hilanda in particular acts as a flâneuse-detective figure (artist’s website), tracing ephemeral clues embedded in urban life and weaving them into narratives of memory, loss and renewal.
López Winkler’s work often materialises through photography, installation, performance and urban interventions. Early solo and group shows include Shaped in Mexico (London, 2014 and 2015), El Álbum Japonés (Málaga, 2014), Galería SAIE de Arquitectura Sustentable (Mexico City, 2014) and Constructed Otherness (London, 2015). C:/Hilanda/to_be_expired/Spinning_Dreams.exe was staged during the Crouch End Festival at Hornsey Town Hall, London (2016); more recent European shows include: Kaleidoscope (Paris, 2017; Budapest, 2017); Unfold(Budapest, 2017); and Postales Desde el Confinamiento (Málaga, 2020).
Collaboration has played an important role in her career. With Drawing Agency she co-created Fragile II(Oxo Tower, London, 2015), a site-specific installation using fragile tape, IV drips, soap and water to explore the paradox of cleanliness and contamination in modern life. In her earlier Crime Scene (Querétaro, 2013) she reflected on crime and the proliferation of private security forces in Mexico. These projects highlight her sustained interest in linking material experimentation to urgent social questions. From her alter-ego, Hilanda, emerged projects such as Obliterated_e, created in response to media coverage of the 45th US presidency and the rise of populist nationalism. By removing every letter ‘e’ from newspaper clippings and preserving the excised fragments, she highlighted both erasure and resilience, suggesting that shared ground persists despite attempts to obliterate it. Her text-performance, On the Threshold extended this enquiry, drawing on Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces to explore thresholds as ‘zero points’ between inside and outside. Rejecting the symbolism of walls, she proposed the door as a more generative metaphor of passage and exchange. In Spinning Doris, she worked with artefacts uncovered in her suburban London home, including a knitting machine and 1940s magazine clippings belonging to a woman named Doris. Reconfiguring the patterns into collaged models, she paid homage to the fabric of everyday life and the social worlds created through acts of knitting and dressing. With C:/Liselottl/to_be_expired/geographies, she turned to the modern city, layering maps of addresses linked to personal and social groups. These overlays became ‘clues’ to identity, revealing how individuals are inscribed into systems of urban governance while also weaving memory into the geography of belonging.
Alongside her practice, López Winkler has developed a significant academic career. She is Senior Tutor and leader of superMATTER within the Interior Design programme at the Royal College of Art, London (RCA). The platform examines ‘matter out of place’ through radical spatial experiments, encouraging students to rethink materials not as inert matter but as active agents of transformation. Her academic contributions also include co-organising the Architectural Association PhD Symposium, The Critique of the New (2008), which interrogated architecture’s obsession with novelty and reframed debates about technology, representation and preservation. Recognition of her artistic achievements came in 2015, when she received the Latin UK Award (LUKAS) for Visual Artist of the Year. López Winkler continues to combine artistic creation, performance, writing and pedagogy, weaving together architectural research with experimental practice. Her work is not represented in the UK public domain.
Irene Iacono