Jorge Otero-Pailos is an American-Spanish artist, preservation architect, scholar, and educator renowned for pioneering experimental preservation practices. Alongside his artistic practice, he is Director and Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP), where he also directs the Columbia Preservation Technology Lab, and where he founded the first PhD program in Historic Preservation in the US. His works have been commissioned by and exhibited at major heritage sites, museums, foundations, and biennials, including the Chicago Architecture Biennale (2017), Artangel’s public art commission at the UK Parliament (2016), the V&A Museum (2015), and the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). He is the recipient of a 2021–22 American Academy in Rome Residency in the visual arts.

Otero-Pailos employs artistic methods—informed by advanced technologies, materials research, and interdisciplinary collaborations—to expand the range of objects that are valued as cultural heritage and to develop new ways of caring for those objects. His wide-ranging artistic practice finds expression through materials such as airborne atmospheric dusts, smells, sounds, and architectural fragments. His series The Ethics of Dust (2008–ongoing) consists of large-scale latex casts and utilizing the dust and pollution residues found on landmarked monuments to highlight how the different kinds of dusts sedimented on buildings function as repositories of previously unexamined environmental histories and collective memories.

For the Biennale, Otero-Pailos collaborated with Saudi artists and heritage experts in charge of Saudi World Heritage sites to create A Library of Earthen Architectures, which includes artifacts representative of Saudi cultural memory. Accompanying each artifact is an audio recording of a conversation between the artists discussing its importance, what makes it worthy of care, and how it expands the range of materials and meanings associated with earthen World Heritage sites such as At-Turaif. The library is a collective open-ended work that centers the role of artists in the physical documentation, interpretation, and presentation of World Heritage sites in Saudi Arabia. It documents the emergence of a multigenerational conversation between Saudi artists exploring experimental preservation methods. The interviews can be accessed through The Learning Garden, the digital extension of the Biennale.