Category: Spring School Workshop 2021

Spring School 2021
→ Весенняя Школа 2021
→ Kevadkool 2021
→ Kevätkoulu 2021

Trollperception in the Heartlands

In 2021, MYCKET embarked on a three year artistic research project called Trollperception in the Heartlands. In Trollperception in the Heartlands, we turn to folktales and legends to reconnect to that time when people in our regions lived closer to, and were more subordinated to nature. Trollperception in the Heartlands is a transdisciplinary design project emerging out of our own heartlands in southern rural Sweden, expanding the formal field used to generate sustainable future scenarios through site-specific crafting and crafting video animations informed by folktales and mythology. During our workshop with the Narva Spring School MYCKET invited the workshop participants to delve into trolls, spirits, and animism together with us, joining the pack, and craft together, while simultaneously mediating and sharing these artworks through filmed animations – investigating what new and unforeseen knowledge can be derived from the process itself. The aim was to explore troll perception through artistic research, and to create and share viable ways of designing and living for the future. Returning people to a dialogue with Earth and its fellow creatures.

Charming Perspectives 

During the Spring School 2021 presentations the participants of the Trollperception in the Heartlands workshop presented some of the <<charms>> they worked with during the week. The group also made an exhibition of the <<charms>> to the (Re)configuring Territories instagram feed.

Spring School 2021
→ Весенняя Школа 2021
→ Kevadkool 2021
→ Kevätkoulu 2021

Post-Brokenness

Andra Aaloe and Francisco Martínez hosted the workshop ‘Post-Brokenness’ in the (Re)configuring Territories Spring School 2021.

In the Workshop participants studied how personal and collective relationships are sustained in relation to the maintenance and repair of the surrounding environment and opened up a wide range of questions about care-taking, sustainability and the fragility of the worlds we inhabit.

The focus was on Eastern Estonia in general, a region affected by monofunctional Soviet industrialism and continuous demographic decrease and political abandonment of the last decades. There, the overwhelming first impression of brokenness (especially viewed from the West) was contested through a series of in-situ micro-ethnographies, where participants were asked to pay attention to the multiple practices and material interventions that establish socio-material stability and maintain our life-worlds as we know them.

By post-brokenness, we thus meant to a condition in which recovery has not been achieved, yet many things continue to go on in the meantime – including care and suturing practices. With a practical-research oriented ethos, the programme combined lectures and reading seminars with multimodal forms of fieldwork techniques – meeting locals and elaborating a final individual project presented on a chosen site of Narva.

Archaeology of Postsocialist Narva tour

On Saturday morning (June 5), participants of the Post-brokenness workshop presented their independent work. They were asked to wear the hat of a future archaeologist and identify a site, a thing, or material trace that could remain 30 years ahead and holds a representative power of the postsocialist condition. In their site-specific presentation, they introduced the selected object individually and explained how it might look like in 2051, as well as possible tournaments of value in the meantime. The exercise combined an ambition to understand and document recent changes in the city of Narva with a speculative, conceptual gesture. The public presentation in a form of a cycling tour started at the Narva Art Residency.

Tour participants: Triin Kampus, Andres Lutz, Farbod Fakharzadeh, Michael Cole, Andra Aaloe & Francisco Martínez.

The main aim of this workshop at the Reconfiguring Territories Spring School was very simple: to feed ourselves and the whole group. The workshop used this necessity as an excuse to explore the participants’ as well as local habits and preferences that start with food and dining but tell a lot about class, cultural backgrounds, feelings of home and political inclinations. Let us carefully scavenge our surroundings for matters to bring to the table: radishes and cucumbers from the supermarket and a local dacha; eggs from a nearby farm; sakuski and toasts; lunch offers; Turkish pizza and Chinese takeout; undervalued grandma pastries from around the corner; overpriced puree soups from the university cafeteria; basement shops and banquet halls; strange jars in cyrillic with surprisingly familiar contents. Let us try to trace meanings, feelings and causes within every bite.

The symbolic title of the workshop is borrowed from the Russian language via sociologist Alexei Yurchak’s book “Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More” (2005), which highlights modes of (mostly kitchen-related) communality inherent to slavic values and the Soviet socialist order (albeit in problematic manifestations). The workshop created an ongoing, open-ended obshchenie – “both a process and a sociality that emerges in that process, and both an exchange of ideas and information as well as a space of affect and togetherness” – to get a better taste of the legacy of these values and history within the local context, and how we (as an international group of progressively disposed designers residing in Narva for a week) relate to them ourselves. 

Participants of the workshop were encouraged to contribute with recipes and ideas for “setting the table” to prompt discussion among the group during dining times. 

Setting the table

During the Spring School 2021 presentations the Obshchenie group set a table for a common lunch moment, which reflected the topics that the group had worked with during the spring school week.