Architecture Open Lecture Series: TANIA TOVAR TORRES – Life after Time

The next lecturer of the Open Lecture Series this spring semester will be Tania Tovar Torres, stepping on the stage of Kanuti Gildi SAAL (Pikk 20, Tallinn) on 5th of April at 6 pm to talk about ‘In Articulo Mortis’, her latest documentary and literary project exploring alternative ways of architectural preservation.

What happens when a building ceases to exist? ‘Life after time’ makes an argument around the demise and afterlife of a building, and the possibility of architecture no longer surviving as an object –building– but rather as a document, a story. By exploring the histories of buildings after their demise, the lecture narrates the divine tale of ancient Temple of Solomon in Jerusalem and its many replicas in time; the relation between Gordon Matta-Clark’s Office Baroque and a robbery in Chinatown; and the comparison of a legal transcript with reality of an apartment in the Tlatelolco Housing Unit after the Earthquake of 1985 in Mexico City; Linking them to make a case for physical and ideological transformations, documentary reinterpretations and legal reproductions and how they can reconstruct physical space, unveil the multilayered conflicts of the archival and politics of the official in conjunction with popular history to make visible the relativity and fragility of architecture’s weight and materiality before the light but powerful pages of history and its preservation.

Tania Tovar Torres is an architect, writer and curator with an interest for narratives where architecture and the built environment stand as main character. She is founder of Proyector, a curatorial platform and exhibition space based in Mexico City devoted to the promotion of architecture research projects. Tania is currently Director and Chief Curator of Proyector, as well as a consultant for the German Cooperation Agency for Sustainable Development in Mexico. Previously she has worked at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery in New York, the University Museum of Science and Art and the National Council for Educational Development in Mexico City. Her research and work has been published in Arquine (MEX), MAS Context (USA) and ARQ (CHL) Magazines, the CCA (CAN) and the UIC (ESP). Tania graduated as an architect from the National Autonomous University of Mexico, studied at the Stuttgart State Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Germany, and holds a Masters in Critical, Curatorial and Conceptual Practices in Architecture from the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation in New York.

Lecture is organised in collaboration with the Museum of Estonian Architecture. It is part of the Future Architecture program which introduces and celebrates innovation, experimentation and the ideas of a generation that will design the architecture and build Europe’s cities in the years to come. See: http://futurearchitectureplatform.org/

The Open Lecture Series brings to Tallinn a number of exciting architects, urban planners, academics from across the world. All Open Lectures are free of charge, in English, take place every fortnight, and are open to everyone – for both students and professionals of the field, general audience and students considering architecture for their further studies.

The architecture and urban design department of the Estonian Academy of Arts has been curating the Open Lectures on Architecture series since 2012 – each year, a dozen architects, urbanists, both practicing as well as academics, introduce their work and field of research to the audience in Tallinn. All lectures are in English, free and open to all interested, drawing an audience of students as well as professionals and academics from the fields of architecture, design, engineering but also fine arts. The series is funded by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.

Curators: Sille Pihlak, Siim Tuksam

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More info: Pille Epner / arhitektuur@artun.ee / +372 642 0071