Переосмысление территорий

Reconfiguring Territories

Territooriumite ümber mõtestamine

Uudelleenmäärittyvät paikallisuudet

This is a subtitle.

Trollperception in the Heartlands

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 Mentors
→ Весенняя Школа
→ Kevadkool
→ Kevätkoulun mentorit

MYCKET collaboration

MYCKET collaboration
Stockholm & Östergötland, founded in 2012 by Mariana Alves Silva, Dr.Katarina Bonnevier and Thérèse Kristiansson. The architecture, art and design practice MYCKET develops artistic research from intersectional perspectives such as anti-racist and queer-feminist theories. A practice informed by the theatrical, the carnivalesque and political activism. Together they rummage through the borderlands of the lives we live, and the environment that surrounds us.

(Re)configuring Territories Talks
→ Доклады на (Пере)осмыслении территорий
→ (Re)configuring Territories vestlusring
→ (Re)configuring Territories -keskustelut

(Re)configuring Territories Talk: Feminist Fairytales, Parties and Eating Together as Spatial Practices

(Re)configuring Territories Talk: Feminist Fairytales, Parties and Eating Together as Spatial Practices
Could fiction and eating dinner together be seen as ways to question the conventional methods of spatial and design practices? Can these careful methods create a more resilient and discursive architecture and design culture? In the talk, the art & architecture group MYCKET (Mariana Alves Silva, Katarina Bonnevier, and Thérèse Kristiansson), graphic designer/writer/baker Maria Muuk and curator Kaisa Karvinen investigate strategies in each of their practices and dream about possible roles of architects and designers in the neighborhoods of current society. The talk starts with a short reading. In the talk, the art & architecture group MYCKET (Mariana Alves Silva, Katarina Bonnevier, and Thérèse Kristiansson), graphic designer/writer/baker Maria Muuk and curator Kaisa Karvinen investigate strategies in each of their practices and dream about possible roles of architects and designers in the neighborhoods of current society. The talk starts with a short reading.

Post-Brokenness

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.

Spring School Mentors
→ Весенняя Школа
→ Kevadkool
→ Kevätkoulun mentorit

Francisco Martínez

Francisco Martínez
Francisco Martínez is an anthropologist dealing with contemporary issues of material culture through ethnographic experiments. In 2018, he was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, and currently he works as Associate Professor at Tallinn University.

Andra Aaloe

Andra Aaloe
Andra Aaloe is a freelancer from Tallinn, Estonia, working across several fields from fine and performing arts to curatorial and educational practices. Andra hosted a ‘Post-Brokenness’ workshop together with Francisco Martínez in the (Re)configuring Territories Spring School 2021.

(Re)configuring Territories Talks
→ Доклады на (Пере)осмыслении территорий
→ (Re)configuring Territories vestlusring
→ (Re)configuring Territories -keskustelut

(Re)configuring Territories Talk: Anthropology, Fieldwork, and Design Research

(Re)configuring Territories Talk: Anthropology, Fieldwork, and Design Research
Interest in anthropology is growing in situated architecture and design research circles, with fieldwork and community-led design processes becoming an increasingly important part of the critical discourse. What should architects, designers, and artists know from anthropology and its methodology? What can these disciplines learn from each other? (Re)configuring Territories program curator Tommi Vasko will talk with professor Francisco Martínez and filmmaker and artist Polina Medvedeva about fieldwork and the relationships between artistic research and anthropology.

Obshchenie

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

Obshchenie

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. 

Image for Maria Muuk's Reconfiguring Territories Spring School 2021 Workshop: Obshchenie. The entrance and menu of a culinary shop slash beer bar in Kreenholm, Narva, 2020
The entrance and menu of a culinary shop slash beer bar in Kreenholm, Narva, 2020
Quotes from Yurchak’s book “Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More”
Quotes from Yurchak’s book “Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More”

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.

Spring School Mentors
→ Весенняя Школа
→ Kevadkool
→ Kevätkoulun mentorit

Maria Muuk

Maria Muuk
Maria Muuk is a graphic designer and writer based in Tallinn, Estonia, whose main research interest is food. By thinking and making through the lens of food, she explores its semiotic, cultural and affective meanings, as well as ways in which food can be used to facilitate change, find commonalities and digest problematics.

(Re)configuring Territories Talks
→ Доклады на (Пере)осмыслении территорий
→ (Re)configuring Territories vestlusring
→ (Re)configuring Territories -keskustelut

(Re)configuring Territories Talk: Feminist Fairytales, Parties and Eating Together as Spatial Practices

(Re)configuring Territories Talk: Feminist Fairytales, Parties and Eating Together as Spatial Practices
Could fiction and eating dinner together be seen as ways to question the conventional methods of spatial and design practices? Can these careful methods create a more resilient and discursive architecture and design culture? In the talk, the art & architecture group MYCKET (Mariana Alves Silva, Katarina Bonnevier, and Thérèse Kristiansson), graphic designer/writer/baker Maria Muuk and curator Kaisa Karvinen investigate strategies in each of their practices and dream about possible roles of architects and designers in the neighborhoods of current society. The talk starts with a short reading. In the talk, the art & architecture group MYCKET (Mariana Alves Silva, Katarina Bonnevier, and Thérèse Kristiansson), graphic designer/writer/baker Maria Muuk and curator Kaisa Karvinen investigate strategies in each of their practices and dream about possible roles of architects and designers in the neighborhoods of current society. The talk starts with a short reading.