(Re)configuring Territories Summer School 2025
“Ecologies of Trust”
June 30 – July 4, 2025
Ecologies of Trust was a five-day summer school held in Daugavpils, Eastern Latvia.
The starting points for the summer school were the city’s fortress building, the meandering river, and the city’s multispecies inhabitants. The summer school aimed to answer critical questions: How can design practices facilitate meaningful change in the midst of geopolitical and ecological crises? How do more-than-human design approaches shape everyday spatial practices in the context of Daugavpils? How do the increased geopolitical tensions in the Eastern Baltic influence understanding of infrastructures? How do these two phenomena relate and influence each other?
The summer school took place at the Daugavpils Fortress, and consisted of two workshops: one facilitated by curator, researcher and architect Kaisa Karvinen and and artist researcher Jaakko Karhunen and the other by researcher and designer Tommi Vasko and anthropologist and environmental activist Mari Vaara.
Workshop 1: Infrastructural trust
The workshop explored how different infrastructures relate to trust: what systems quietly support daily life, and what happens when they break, are repaired, or reimagined? Through readings, discussions, and fieldwork in Daugavpils, participants observed local infrastructures and created a small piece to share in the final exhibition.
Workshop 2: Live Action Ecosystem Exercises
The second workshop focused on ecosystem mapping and used roleplay as a method in understanding the Daugavpils fortress and its meaning to local people and other species. The workshop first sketched a map of the fortress ecosystem and its main actors using walks, interviews and observation as our method. In the end the participants produced a collection of human and more-than human characters and encounters between them.
The two workshops had five to six participants each, including active local citizens and students, as well as students from diverse design disciplines within the Nordic-Baltic region, selected through an open call.
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Ecologies of Trust is a second phase of (Re)configuring Territories research programme. First located in Narva in Eastern Estonia, the programme is a platform for socially engaged design research, collaboration and networking between Nordic and Baltic design communities and a way to support experiments and engagement with local organizations actively shaping the urban and more-than-human spaces in Daugavpils.
The Summer School was supported by Aalto University Design Department and Nordic Council of Ministers’ Office in Latvia.
For more information, contact:
Tommi Vasko
+358 5903600864
tommi.vasko@aalto.fi
and
Vadims Murašovs
+371 26078107
vadims.murasovs@norden.lv