Category: Spring School Workshop 2021

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.

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.

Participants: Michael Cole, Andres Lutz, Triin Kampus, Farbod Fakharzadeh, Andra & Francisco.

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

Obshchenie

The main aim of this workshop at the Reconfiguring Territories Spring School is very simple: to feed ourselves and the whole group. We will use this necessity as an excuse to explore our own 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). We will try to create 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 will be encouraged to contribute with recipes and ideas for “setting the table” to prompt discussion among the group during dining times. 

Spring School Mentors
→ Весенняя Школа
→ Kevadkool
→ Kevätkoulun mentorit

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.

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(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

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.

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