#StandingWithUkraine

Ecologies of Trust is a five-day summer school held in Daugavpils, Eastern Latvia.  The starting points for the summer school are the city’s fortress building, the meandering river, and the city’s multispecies inhabitants. The summer school aims 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?

Ecologies of Trust is a second phase of (Re)configuring Territories research programme, and the Program Launch event is a first step in relocating the programme to Daugavpils. The aim of the event is to reflect these questions, make connections with local inhabitants and institutions, and to situate the programme in the human and more-than-human networks for the coming years.

The exhibition ‘НА КОЗЕ НЕ ПОДЪЕДЕШЬ (YOU CAN’T GET THERE ON A GOAT)’ exhibition debuts two site-specific spatial gallery interventions by recent NART Artists-in -Residents Andrea Stanislav (US) and varialambo (Varia Sjöström, Hatz Lambo) (FI/DE). The two solo projects link to transfigure NART’s gallery spaces through a physicality of visual poetics and theatre, informed by dreams, experiences, performances, and unexpected events which took place at NART on the Estonian-Russian border in the Summer of 2022. Both artists reflect upon the sight of Narva as a contextualised charged corridor or ‘Zona’, where language, exile, history, neighbourliness, rapprochement, diplomacy and cyclical memories shift into immersive environments of light, sound, sculpture and moving image.

We are organizing a festival at Narva Art Residency. The festival is called Festival of Invitations, and it consists of lectures, discussions, workshops and a celebratory dinner at the Narva Art Residency and its surroundings. The event also celebrates the opening of an exhibition by varialambo [1] and Andréa Stanislav. This event is the concluding part of four-year (Re)configuring Territories research project, and we hope that it will bring together both those who have participated in the project in the previous years and those who have not yet become familiar with it.

Sean Roy Parker who is in the Kreenholm Plants residency at Nart in June and July wrote a lovely review of the Seeds, Pollen, Future Spring School workshop group’s performance.

We are happy to invite you to the School of the Near Future in Narva Art Residency to conclude (Re)configuring Territories Spring School 2022.