Open Lectures

Ezio Manzini, a world-renowned advocate for sustainability and social innovation in design, will give a public lecture “Livable proximity. A design-orienting scenario” on Tuesday, December 17, starting at 4:00 PM in room A101.

In the past century, the spatial organization of modern societies has been dominated by the effects of an idea of efficiency based on specialization and the economy of scale. In the name of efficiency, some areas have specialized: those where to work, those where to have fun, those where to study, and those where to go back to sleep. We can refer to all of this as the scenario of distance.

Over time, however, it clearly emerged that the application of this scenario was leading to very serious environmental and social problems. Therefore, for long time some cases appeared in which this model began to clash with other ideas and practices, driven by the need to bring together what had been separated and to reconnect what had been disconnected. That is, to bring services, workplaces and people’s homes closer together. These new ideas and practices, i.e. these social innovations, can be seen as the beginning of a new, emerging scenario: the scenario of proximity.

Although the problems of the society of distance were evident for long time, until 2019, the ideas and practices that had led to the definition of the scenario of proximity have slowly advanced. Then the pandemic arrived and, paradoxically, the same sanitary distancing it required has shown everyone how important physical proximity is: the social role of neighborhood services; the advantage of working close to where you live; the importance of having good relationships with the tenants next-door. In short, the value of the scenario of proximity has been recognized by a growing number of people and institutions

The lecture discusses this scenario of proximity, showing how it has emerged from the grassroots social innovations of the past 20 years, and how, in some large cities, it has become a reference for action, sometimes using the expression “15-minute city”, with the creation of new proximity systems capable of responding to many, if not all, the daily needs of citizens.

Finally, underlining how the strategies for approaching this scenario are profoundly place-based, the lecture also identifies some common traits and focuses on one of them.

The conceptual background on which the lecture is based can be found in: “Design, When Everybody Designs”, MIT Press 2015, “Politics of the Everyday.” Bloomsbury, 2019 (both are also published in China) and Livable Proximity (Egea, 2022)

For over three decades Ezio Manzini has been working in the field of design for sustainability. Most recently, his interests have focused on social innovation, considered as a major driver of sustainable changes. In this perspective, he started DESIS: an international network of schools of design, active in the field of design for social innovation for sustainability.

In 2024, the Design Research Society awarded him the Lifetime Achievement Award.

Presently, he is President of DESIS Network and an Honorary Professor at the Politecnico di Milano. He has been a guest professor in several design schools worldwide, as (in the past decade): Elisava-Design School and Engineering (Barcelona), Tongji University (Shanghai), Jiangnan University (Wuxi), University of the Arts (London), CPUT (Cape Town), Parsons -The New School for Design (NYC)

His most recent books are: “Design, When Everybody Designs”, MIT Press 2015; “Politics of the Everyday.” Bloomsbury, 2019; “Livable Proximity” Egea, 2021, “Plug-ins: Design for City Making in Barcelona” (with Albert Fuster and Roger Paez, Elisava and Actar Publishers 2023; Fare Assieme, Una nuova generazione di servizi pubblici collaborativi (con Michele D’Alena), Egea, 2024

The Design Open Lecture series 2024 is part of Sandra Nuut and Ruth-Helene Melioranski’s Design Issues course. It is public and open to all.

Leonardo Custódio, PhD, is a Brazilian post-doctoral researcher at Åbo Akademi University, Finland. He also co-coordinates the Anti-Racism Media Activist Alliance (ARMA Alliance) and the Finland-Based Activist Research Network. The  title of this talk will be “A Conversation on Decoloniality and Design.” 

He is an an educator and expert on communication for development and social change. He supports individuals and organizations to understand, develop and promote uses of means of communication available for internal and external strategies grounded on the principles of human rights, social justice, mutual learning and respect. For that, he applies research-based knowledge and dialogue-centered skills to organize workshops, lectures, talks and consultancies designed specifically to the participants’ needs.

Inga Lāce’s research specialises in modern and contemporary art across Soviet and Post-Soviet Eastern Europe, Caucasus, and Central Asia as well as its diaspora, with a particular focus on migration and transnational connections. She was C-MAP Central and Eastern Europe Fellow at MoMA, New York (2020-2023) and has an extensive history of curating internationally, with previous projects including the Latvian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (2019); Survival Kit (2017-23); Portable Landscapes at Villa Vassilieff, the Latvian National Art Museum and James Gallery at CUNY (2018); Riga Notebook at Muzeum Sztuki (2020); It Won’t Be Long Now, Comrades! at Framer Framed (2017); Performing the Fringe at Konsthall C (2020) and Pori Art Museum (2021).

Making a Museum Being a Guest

In this talk Inga Lāce will talk about her experience and work as Chief Curator at the Almaty Museum of Arts, a new private museum opening in summer of 2025 in Almaty.

She will particularly speak about

Qonaqtar, a group exhibition drawn from the museum’s collection which explores the connections and tensions between hospitality and migration, with a focus on Kazakhstan, Central Asia and neighbouring regions.

The title of the exhibition Qonaqtar (Konaktar) originates from the Kazakh qонаq (qonaq), meaning ‘guest’, derived from the Turkic root kon- (to ‘land’ or ‘descend’). It embodies the deep-rooted tradition of welcoming guests with warmth and respect, reflecting nomadic customs where hosting travellers was essential for survival in vast, often harsh landscapes. Guests can also be of a different nature of course, and hospitality can be abused, which is where the exhibition nods at the often forced migration campaigns of the Soviet Union where the act of hosting for Kazakhstan and Central Asia wasn’t a choice. Most notably, the Russian settlement in Central Asia in the nineteenth century, or the displacement of Koreans to Central Asia in the 1930s, and sending Soviet dissidents to Karaganda, stories that also, in one way or another, contributed to the society and art scenes of Kazakhstan.

Guests becoming locals and hosts and locals becoming guests somewhere because of fleeing or displacement is an endless theme of migration yet here it opens up a highly region-specific prism.

Co-funded by:

Bianca Herlo will give a public lecture entitled “Digital Justice. Feminist Futures” on Tuesday, December 10th at 16:00 in room A501. 

Design, arts, culture, media, and science are eagerly trying to categorize the latest developments in digital technology. Affirmative voices praise especially GenAI and its potentials, critical voices are expressing concerns about the developments in digital technologies and especially AI, and their eco-social consequences. Under the conditions of complex structural crises, technology-induced transformation processes and uncertain futures, new understandings of research and knowledge production might play a decisive role.

How can we shape digitalization processes in the interest of a fairer future for people and the environment? To what extent can practice-integrating research be understood as transformative research?

Bianca Herlo is Professor of Eco-Social Design and head of the Competence Center “Transformation Design” at Lucerne University, Design Film Art. She has been working for many years on issues of inequalities, social and digital participation and the potential of design for a more just digital transformation. As a research group leader at the Weizenbaum Institute and the Berlin University of the Arts, she has worked in national and international collaborations with actors from the arts, academia, politics and civil society to explore how emerging discourses of injustice and inequality can be translated into structural change.

Bianca is a founding member of the international Social Design Network (SDN) and chair of the German Society for Design Theory and Research (DGTF). Since 2022 she has co-hosted the podcast “Purple Code. Intersectional feminist perspectives on digital societies” (purplecode.org).

The Design Open Lecture series 2024 is part of Sandra Nuut and Ruth-Helene Melioranski’s Design Issues course. It is public and open to all.

TOPOLOGIES OF SOFTNESS – FUTURE(S) OF SPACE

On Friday 29 November at 5 p.m, Gabi Schillig, Professor of Spatial Design and Exhibition Design at the Berlin University of the Arts, will give an open lecture on softness and ephemeral spatiality at EKA. This semester, Schillig is teaching in the MA programme of Interior Architecture. In this lecture, she will open up about her creative practice and present past teaching projects.

Gabi Schillig explores and shapes responsive architectures and spaces of communication. Her artistic work and teaching resonates with an ephemeral, animate, imaginary and temporal understanding of spaces and bodies. She explores the spatial and dimension of a corporeal existence through the sensorial interrelationship of softness, fragility and intimacy as spatial, material and social concepts. Softness creates new possibilities for making contact and being in touch with the world – examining relationships with the „other“, the unknown, the foreign, in contrast and in opposition to violence and destruction that is on the rise in societies world-wide. Instead, as a counter movement, there is a need to unfold new forms of soft spatialities.

Gabi Schillig studied Architecture and completed her postgraduate studies in Conceptual Design at the Städelschule – Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste Frankfurt am Main before founding her ‘Studio for Dialogical Spaces’ in Berlin in 2008. She has exhibited internationally and received several fellowships and prizes, amongst others: Akademie Schloss Solitude Stuttgart (2007-08), Van Alen Institute New York (2009), Nordic Artists’ Centre Dale (2010) , KHOJ International Artists’ Association New Delhi (2011), Largo das Artes Rio de Janeiro (2015), Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau (2016) and Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of the Arts (2018 – 19). Most recent projects have been „bodies without organs*“ for Liebling Haus in Tel Aviv (with Lila Chitayat, 2020-21) or „Accento – The City in the Piano VI“ (in collaboration with dancer and choreographer Yui Kawaguchi and jazz pianist and composer Aki Takase, silent green Berlin, 2022), where she explored the parallels between the structural elements of the piano, space and sound through performative soft architectures and spatial choreographic body-related objects.

From 2012 – 2018 she taught as a professor at the Düsseldorf Peter Behrens School of Art and in 2018 she was appointed as Professor for Spatial Design and Exhibition Design at the Berlin University of the Arts at the Institute of Transmedia Design. During winter 2024_25 she will be teaching as a guest at the EKA Estonian Academy of the Arts in Tallinn, Estonia.

In autumn/winter 2023 Gabi Schillig was an artist-in-residence at Saiko Neon and guest artist at ACAC – Aomori Contemporary Art Center, Japan to explore the potentials of soft matters – spaces of ephemerality and held her first solo exhibition in Japan at Kobo Chika Gallery in Tokyo. For spring 2024 she was invited to join ダイロッカン:dai6okkan 2024 Residency Art Festival initiated by 6okken, Yamanashi Prefecture. In spring 2025 she will return to Japan as an artist-in-residence at Space Department Nara to continue her artistic research on topologies of softness and the sensory, affective, poetic and socio-political dimension of air, space, bodies and atmosphere.

→ www.gabischillig.de
→ www.spacesofcommunication.de

Everyone from the fields of architecture, design, and art are welcome to join! The lecture will be in English and is free of charge. We wish to thank Erasmus+ programme for supporting this lecture.

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Photo Credits_
(left) Gabi Schillig, soft architectures / performed by Yui Kawaguchi / photo by Anna Pasco Bolta / VG Bild-Kunst Bonn / bodies move differently in presence / TUM / München (2022)
(right) Gabi Schillig, absolute interiority (2024)  

Design Issues: Hasso Krull’s Talk “Earth Thought: sentipensar con la tierra Arturo Escobar and the Cosmovisions of the Relational Ontology” on Tuesday, November 19 at 4:00 PM, in room A501 at the Estonian Academy of Arts (EKA).

We have been taught that we live in the modern world. The axis of modernity is progress, based on rationality, development and technology. However, we have also learned that modernity is in a perpetual crisis. But why does development always lead to a disaster? Maybe modernity is not a solution, but in itself a problem? If that is the case, we need to redefine it. We need several new cosmovisions and something that Arturo Escobar has called pluriversal politics.
Hasso Krull (b. 1964) is an Estonian poet who has published sixteen books of poetry and nine collections of essays that include literary criticism as well as writings concerning art, cinema and society. During 1990-2017 he was teaching cultural theory at the Estonian Institute of Humanities (special courses on creation myths, oral tradition, continental philosophy and psychoanalysis). From 2019 he has been teaching creative writing in the Estonian Academy of Arts.

The Design Open Lecture series 2024 is part of Sandra Nuut and Ruth-Helene Melioranski’s Design Issues course. It is public and open to all.

Minna Henriksson: Archive as artwork. Kiila Feminist Archive and other cases

Artist Minna Henriksson will talk about the crucial role archives have played in her artworks, both as source of information and influence. In addition, Henriksson has built archives, or complemented existing ones, as artworks. During the talk she will introduce several cases, where she has implemented archives and archiving in her artistic practice in different ways, and aims to explain her motivations for working with archives, and history writing in general.

Minna Henriksson (b. 1976, Oulu, Finland, lives in Helsinki) is a visual artist working with a disparate range of tools including text, drawing, painting and linocut. In dealing with historical cases, Henriksson hopes to politicize contemporary events that seem neutral and inevitable. The ideological nature of historiography is a recurring theme in her work.

Contemporary Art and Context is a lecture series hosted by MA Contemporary Art. This lecture is organized in collaboration with Archival Impulse, an elective course taught by Lieven Lahaye that introduces students to the practicalities, considerations and possibilities of using archives and archival material as part of their practice as artists and designers.

The lecture is held in English, everyone is welcome to join!

11.11
Triin Tint – “Stitch by stitch – a journey from EKA to the H&M knitting design team (and who knows where to go)”

Triin Tint is a designer with a background at EKA and Aalto University, whose niche is knitwear. The designer, who has long been interested in conceptual (fashion) art and telling stories through clothes, ironically has been working for the last few years in one of the biggest fashion brands in Stockholm.

In the lecture on 11.11, Triin will talk about his own journey and its development.

The lecture will be held in English

Karolin Tampere: Curiosity led learning through curating, collaboration and care

Karolin Tampere will show and tell from her ongoing PhD research project Down in the Bog – Thinking with Peatlands. A project led by an ambition to create cross-pollinating meeting grounds for art, natural science, environmental issues and the public. The three chapters project emphasizes the sharing and embodying of knowledge and awareness to create attention towards the need for increased care for peatland areas, locally, nationally and internationally. Practically and conceptually, the topic of peatlands act as a guiding map and compass to learn about historical, cultural and contemporary and geopolitical changes in the environments in Sápmi / Northern Norway, Estonia and selected places internationally.

Throughout the two group exhibitions Down in the Bog: Hibernation (Tromsø Art Center) and Down in the Bog – Sporulation (EKKM, Tallinn) followed by Thinking with Peatlands symposium, artists, natural scientists, environmental activists, NGOs and the public have lent the ecosystem of peatlands as a prism for sharing, learning and collaboration. Together we have dived deep into the bog, listened, smelled, touched it and learnt from it.

Karolin Tampere is an artist and curator currently a PhD Research fellow in Curatorial practice at Tromsø Art Academy, UiT and KMD, Faculty of Fine Art, Bergen, Norway. She has a particular interest in collaborative, cross disciplinary, long term socially engaged art practices, sound, music and listening. Karolin´s curatorial practice has dealt with a wide range of topics fueled by her interests, including gentrification, city development, art in public space, rights of nature, socially engaged art and ecology and the other-than-human.

Since 2004 she has regularly contributed to the “forever lasting” art project Sørfinnset skole/the nord land initiated by artists Geir Tore Holm and Søssa Jørgensen. Together with Åse Løvgren their ongoing collaboration Rakett was initiated in 2003. In 2013 and partly 2014 she was serving as director of Konsthall C in Stockholm and collaboratively transformed the directorship of the institution into a collective named the Work Group/Arbetslaget. In 2017-2022 she served as curator at North Norwegian Art Centre, realizing context specific projects with artists across the whole region of Northern Norway. She co-curated Lofoten Sound Art Symposium (with Svein Ingvoll Pedersen) and LIAF2019 Lofoten International Art Festival (with Hilde Mehti, Torill Østby Håland and Neal Cahoon). Since 2011 she is part of ENSAYOS – a collective research practice that has developed distinct inquiries into extinction, human geography, and coastal and peatland health. The mission of Ensayos is to do eco-cultural conservation work in Tierra del Fuego and other archipelagos through collaborative art, science and community projects in partnership with existing decolonial, ecological, and cultural conservation initiatives. In 2022 ENSAYOS presented «The Gift» as part of «TURBA TOL HOL HOL TOL» – The Chilean Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale.

«Contemporary Art and Context» is a lecture series hosted by MA Contemporary Art.

The lecture will be held in English, everyone is welcome to join! 

The Open Lecture series of the EKA Faculty of Architecture will take place in the autumn of 2024 under the general title S*cial – Values in the built realm.

The lecturers will focus on the ongoing shift in planning practice, where considerations other than pure economic viability increasingly play a role in decision-making.

On November 28 Petra Marko will hold the lecture “Meanwhile City – The power of temporary interventions in long-term change”.

Petra Marko is an architect and placemaking expert dedicated to creating people-centric cities and public spaces. She serves as Chief executive of the Metropolitan Institute of Bratislava, driving strategic architecture, urban planning and participatory placemaking initiatives to enhance quality of life. She’s known for leading Marko&Placemakers, an urban design practice in London and campaigning to unlock London’s small sites. An advocate for greener cities and active travel, Petra has co-authored VeloCity and Meanwhile City – a best practice and how-to guide for temporary interventions.

Mattias Malk, curator of the autumn lecture series, PhD student and visiting lecturer at the Faculty of Architecture, describes the main theme of the lecture series as follows:

Inclusion, the valorisation of social space and the changing role of architects, especially in the public sector, are gaining ground in Europe’s spatial development, but things are still moving slowly in Estonia. So far, our economic growth has been based on environmental degradation and, despite rigid market-driven planning, we are among the weakest in the EU in resource use. However, the foundations of a smarter spatial policy, which is more profitable than profit, are still undefined and untested. 

One of the aims of the lecture series is to define and rehabilitate the word ‘social’ in Estonian spatial policy, including the social responsibility mentioned in the new planned public procurement. All the invited lecturers deal with the issues of space and sociality in their daily work and will share their experiences of the changing role of architects through examples. 

The lectures are intended for all disciplines, not only for students and professionals in the field of architecture. All lectures are in English and free of charge.

Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Faculty of Architecture of EKA presents a dozen unique practitioners and valued theorists in the field in Tallinn every academic year. See all the lectures: www.avatudloengud.ee

The lecture series is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.