Open Lectures

EKA Urban Studies programme invites prospective Master’s students to join the online info session on Thursday, December 9, 2021 at 16:00 (GMT+2).

This online info session will be a good opportunity to hear more about the curriculum, and to meet and ask questions directly from people behind Urban Studies programme. The info session will be hosted online over Zoom.

If you would like to attend, please register online through the form below. A link to attend will be e-mailed shortly before the event begins.

Registration is closed.

Recording of the session HERE.

More information about Urban Studies MSc programme:

• https://www.artun.ee/urban-studies
• https://www.facebook.com/urbantallinn

Next admissions period starts on the 1st of February 2022 and application deadline is 1st of March 2022.

https://artun.ee/admissions

More information:

Maarja Pabut
maarja.pabut@artun.ee

As part of the Open Lectures series of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design of EKA, writer and researcher Philip Maughan will take the stage in the hall of EKA on November 25th, 6 pm with a lecture titled “Black Almanac: Processing, Cooking and Expanding Earth”.

This fall, all the OLS lectures revolve around the issue of healing in one way or another. We’ve explored whether architecture as a process can be therapeutic and in what way inhabiting space could be restorative – and whether and how architects could contribute to the healing of the construction world. 

On November 25th, we take a look at something directly and closely related to health – the food system – and ask how it could be healed. In order to feed ourselves we cook the land, the atmosphere, the oceans, and other animals, and the earth in turn is cooking us. Named for the tradition of farmer’s almanacs that stretches back to the dawn of agriculture, and for the potential of the earth’s most fertile, dark synthetic soil, this open lecture will introduce Black Almanac: a catalog of steps to produce a viable food system by 2050. It asks when and why food culture became so reactionary, and how might we “cook” with flavors, landscapes, genes, machines and buildings in order to expand a sustainable, nutritious, and desirable feast for a growing population at planetary scale. Black Almanac is a growing index of urgent questions around food, with tough and surprising lessons for the present, and new hope for the future.

Philip Maughan is a writer and researcher based between London and Berlin. He was a member of The Terraforming cohort at the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in 2020 and is currently working on a book about food and climate change under the title Black Almanac.

https://philipmaughan.net/ 

In order to minimize the risk of the virus spreading, we will broadcast the lecture on EKA TV and it can be viewed along with all previous lectures at www.avatudloengud.ee as well as the faculty’s Youtube channel. The lecture can also be attended in-person – we do ask you to carry your COVID vaccination certificate or proof of having had COVID and cover your nose and mouth with a mask. Academy students are subject to the usual in-house rules. NB! You can’t ask questions via EKA TV, so it’s worth coming to the hall to participate in the discussion! The lecture is free and in English.

Curators: Sille Pihlak and Johan Tali.

The season of open lectures is supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.

Department of Graphic Design’s GD Lunch series is back and the first presentation will be by graphic designer Maria Muuk on Monday, 1 November at 16:00 on Zoom. Please join us here. Zoom ID: 940 6079 6104

Maria is going to talk about the graphic design process of the exhibition “Art is Design is Art” (Kumu Art Museum, 07.05.–03.10.2021), which showcased Estonian late Soviet unique design objects and poster design. It’s an interesting case study of a commissioned exhibition identity with a lot of designer’s input, as well as a glimpse into the rabbit hole of the recent yet forgotten history and craftsmanship of manual graphic designing tools, which the 1980s Soviet poster artists and their printers mastered in inspiring socialist unison.

On Tuesday, 26 October at 17:30 Charlotte Rohde will give a lecture at EKA hall.

Typedesigner and artist Charlotte Rohde will talk about her latest project “HOT MESS 2021”, which she will contextualise within her practice. In her work “HOT MESS 2021”, Rohde explores the idea of 2021 womanhood through niche internet culture, thinking about Naomi Osaka and Britney Spears, who dared to become human under the public eye. Machine-produced and hand-treated, “HOT MESS 2021” performs a self-fetishisation to reclaim its body and emotionality from the public gaze.

Charlotte Rohde is a (type-)designer and artist researching letters as an extension of the body and dealing with hyper-femininity, pop culture and (self-)control. Her work manifests somewhere between contemporary art, niche internet culture and type design as a tool of écriture féminine.

Alphabetizing the Matrix of Discomfort. The Open Lecture Series presents: Matteo Cainer

As part of the Open Lectures series of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design of EKA, practising architect, curator and educator Matteo Cainer will take the stage in the hall of EKA on November 4th, 6 pm with lecture “Alphabetizing the Matrix of Discomfort”.

This fall, all the lectures in the series revolve around the issue of healing in one way or another. Let’s look at whether architecture as a process can be therapeutic and in what way inhabiting space could be restorative – and simultaneously, whether and how architects can contribute to the healing of the construction world. On November 4th, we’ll kick off by discussing how to approach architecture in a now changing world – what kind of a vocabulary might architects need for the emerging future. Matteo Cainer will be walking us through three architectural / research projects, from their inception, in relation to their concept and environmental, architectural and social aims, as a means of proving a sort of evidence and support to the three lines of research/interests that he and his practice share: converging ecologies, resilient adaptive re-use and social weaving.

Prior to opening his own practice MCA in 2010 in London, Cainer worked and collaborated with a number of celebrated international practices including Eisenman Architects in New York City, Coop Himmelb(l)au in Vienna, and Arata Isozaki Associati in Milan. In 2004 he was Assistant Director for the 9th International Architecture Biennale METAMORPH, in 2006 Curator of the London Architecture Biennale CHANGE and in 2018 curator of the Dark Side Club in Venezia. 

In 2011, Cainer moved to Paris where he was Associate professor and HMONP director at the École Spéciale d’Architecture and it was there that he created and directed the “Pavillon Spéciale” series. It was also in Paris that he conceived and hosted “Architecture Whispers” and in 2013 co-founded and co-directed with Odile Decq the Confluence Institute for Innovation and Creative Strategies in Architecture in Lyon. In 2018, Cainer moved back to London and was nominated curator for the 7th Edition of the Dark Side Club for the International Architecture Biennale in Venezia. Today, he remains a regular visiting critic at both Westminster and the AA. In March 2020, to respond to the pandemic, Cainer launched MCA Online, a free educational initiative to provide lectures, teaching, and support to home-bound students, and at the end of the year, he opened MCA in Milan, Italy.

The work of Matteo Cainer and his practice has won various awards and has been published in numerous books and international magazines; it has also been featured in various international exhibitions among which the Royal Academy in London and the Pisa Architecture Biennale. Matteo has also lectured and written and edited a number of books and articles in the field of architecture and design, and his studio featured in numerous books, international magazines and was selected as one of the 25 significant emerging international practices at the London Architecture Festival.

In order to minimize the risk of the virus spreading, we will broadcast the lecture on EKA TV

 and it can be viewed along with all previous lectures at www.avatudloengud.ee. However, the lecture can also be attended in-person – we do ask you to carry your COVID vaccination certificate or proof of having had COVID; there will be no on-site testing. Academy students are subject to the usual in-house rules. NB! You can’t ask questions via EKA TV, so it’s worth coming to the hall to participate in the discussion! The lecture is free and in English.

Curators: Sille Pihlak and Johan Tali.

The season of open lectures is supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.

On Thursday, October 28th at 4pm, Ruth Sargent Noyes will give an open lecture “Globalizing art histories of North-eastern Europe before modernity: a view from the Baltic” as part of the Open Lectures’ series of the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture of the Estonian Academy of Arts.
Room: A-101

Through a series of queries and micro-historical case studies, Dr. Noyes takes up the questions of issues of globalizing Baltic art before modernity, from the perspective of an art historian focused on connecting Italy and the Baltic over the longue durée. Global approaches have been gaining momentum in recent years across fields dedicated to the study of art, architecture, and visual-material culture. An increasing number of scholars of North-Eastern Europe, including the Baltic sphere, have expanded the purview of research through the integration of comparative and transcultural methods. Elsewhere, the global turn has led to new transgeographical perspectives which have begun to challenge previous national paradigms in various art-historical traditions. This presentation examines these issues from a transregional, transcultural perspective, and also considers how integration of Baltic Europe’s art histories in the discipline’s ongoing explorations of cultural heterogeneity and global circulations of artefacts can be inflected through other fields.

Ruth Sargent Noyes took her BA (Harvard University) and MA and PhD (Johns Hopkins University) in Art History, and is presently Marie Skłodowska-Curie EU Senior Research Fellow at the National Museum of Denmark (Copenhagen). Author of a number of books and articles, her research takes up the intersection of art, religion, and science of the long Counter-Reformation (c. 1550-1800) in its global context, with special interest in cross-cultural perspectives between Italy and North-eastern Europe, including the Nordic-Baltic region. A 2014 Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and recipient of a number of research grants and awards, she currently leads the Marie Skłodowska-Curie European Union Individual Fellowship Project, The art of (re)moving relics and reforming holiness in Europe’s borderlands (TRANSLATIO).

Lecture will be held in English.

Covid certificates will be checked at the entrance of the lecture hall, masks are obligatory.

As part of the design theory course at the Faculty of Design, professor Alison J. Clarke will give a public lecture The Politics of Design on Tuesday, 19 October at 9:30AM at the EKA hall.

This lecture draws on the themes of the speaker’s recent publication Victor Papanek: Designer for the Real World (MIT Press 2021) and the co-curated exhibition The Politics of Design (with Vitra Design Museum, Germany) exploring the origins of the social design movement and its attempts to consciously decolonise design. Unpicking the contradictions of designers’ gestures to transform the material and social worlds of the ‘excluded’ and ‘under-represented’ – the talk casts a critical eye on how attempts have been made, with varying degrees of success, to build cultural difference into design practice and theory.

The lecture will be held at the EKA hall. EKA students and staff are asked to follow the general EKA COVID-19 safety rules. Guests are kindly asked to follow all COVID-19 rules and prove their infection safety. There is no on-site testing. The lecture will be held in English, and it will be streamed on EKA TV platform live, however, the lecture will not be recorded.

Professor Alison J. Clarke, author of Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design (MIT Press 2021) and Design Anthropology: Object Cultures in Transition (Bloomsbury 2018), explores the intersection of design, material culture and anthropology. A design historian (Royal College of Art London) and trained social anthropologist (University College London), she joined the University of Applied Arts Vienna from the Royal College of Art, London to become chair of the department of Design History and Theory and founding director of the Papanek Foundation: she is convener of the biennial Papanek Symposium exploring the ethics and futures of contemporary design. Recipient of major international grants and fellowships (including the Smithsonian; Arts and Humanities Research Council; Austrian Science Fund; Graham Foundation), she acts as an expert advisor and jury member for numerous academic bodies including the Danish Independent Research Council and the German Research Foundation (DfG) program, Clusters of Excellence.

Clarke is a regular media broadcaster, curator and international speaker in the field of design; her monograph Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s American was optioned for an Emmy-nominated documentary. She is co-editor of the anthology Émigré Cultures in Design and Architecture and co-founder of the leading academic journal Home Cultures: The Journal of Architecture, Design and Domestic Space. She has recently curated, with Vitra Design Museum, Germany, the international travelling exhibition Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design (2017-2020). Her latest book project, for MIT Press, explores the historical origins and legacies of the intertwining of social science and industrial design.

Presentation of workshop results and talk on the potential of urban interventions.

“Reports from the field” is a presentation of the workshop results of the MA Urban Studies students from the Estonian Academy of Arts and a talk on creating urban interventions as a research method, but also as a civic exercise and public right.

The presented projects will review and reflect the process of constructing vernacular interventions and their reception in Tallinn. Topics included in the presentation concentrate on infrastructure, public space, care, maintenance and social responsibility on the examples of the T1 mall, unpaid female labor in Majaka, private security in public space and new cycling lanes among others. There will also be a presentation about EKKM’s role in public space and a display of the interventions. 

You are very welcome to take part in this talk and contribute to the discussion on the role and responsibility of urban intervention. The event is in English.

The authors are: Kush Badhwar, Yu-Li Anne Boonen, Khadeeja Farrukh, Timothée Girault, Christian Hörner, Nabeel Imtiaz, Marie Lucet,  Agota Maziliauskaitė, Dorothea Müller, Luca Liese Ritter, Zeno Schnelle, Paul Simon, Nora Soo, Akvilė Stundytė, Katrin Tomiste, Paula Kristiāna Veidenbauma, Friederike Zängl.

Studio lead: Mattias Malk

As part of the Open Lectures series of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design of EKA, architectural critic and urbanist Konstantin Budarin will take the stage in the hall of EKA on October 14, 6 pm with a lecture “Infrastructure of Care: The Past, Present, and Future of Soviet Leisure Heritage”.

This fall, all the lectures in the series revolve around the issue of healing in one way or another. Let’s look at whether architecture as a process can be therapeutic and in what way inhabiting space could be restorative, Simultaneously, whether and how architects can contribute to the healing of the construction world. However, some of the lectures in the series – as well as the October 14 lecture – look directly at the architecture created especially for landscape of care.

Konstantin Budarin is a member of the architectural collective Kultura and one of the initiators of the research project Sanatorium Premium – the focus of the latter is on the Soviet-era recreational infrastructure and the development of its possible uses today. The sanatorium architecture of the so-called Eastern Bloc has become a social media hit in recent years, viewed as an archaic curiosity with aesthetic pleasure, without delving into the role of sanatoriums in the operation of large-scale industry, or how a recreational machine worked to oil the human cogs of a production machine. The spatial programme of any sanatorium was led by prescription procedures, and Budarin asks – what procedures and what space would we need today to stimulate exhausted bodies and burned out minds? Do we have anything to learn from the sanatorium system in the Eastern Bloc?

Konstantin Budarin is the author of numerous publications on architecture and urbanism published in Strelka Mag, Calvert Journal, Project Baltia, and others. He is an alumnus of Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design 2014/15.

In order to minimize the risk of the virus spreading, we will broadcast the lecture on EKA TV and it can be viewed along with all previous lectures at www.avatudloengud.ee. However, the lecture can also be attended in-person – we do ask you to carry your COVID vaccination certificate or proof of having had COVID; there will be no on-site testing. Academy students are subject to the usual in-house rules. NB! You can’t ask questions via EKA TV, so it’s worth coming to the hall to participate in the discussion! The lecture is free and in English.

This lecture takes place in cooperation with the Estonian Museum of Architecture and is part of the Future Architecture programme 2021. Future Architecture is the first pan-European platform uniting architectural museums, festivals and other development organisations in the field, bringing the public closer to both the cities and the future of architecture. The lecture is supported by the European Union’s Creative Europe Programme.

Curators: Sille Pihlak and Johan Tali.

The season of open lectures is supported by the Estonian Cultural Endowment.

Event in Facebook

Read more about the project: https://futurearchitectureplatform.org/projects/fb47b9a7-2d22-44fb-ae41-c292af573953/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/sanatorium_premium/?igshid=2vsox2u8jewe

Estonian Academy of Arts
Graphic Design Department presents

Åbäke
ENTER FATIMA, or what happened at Tel Aviv Airport when the custom officer scanned my luggage and saw body parts

Wednesday, 29 September, 7om
Narva Art Residency (NART)
Joala 18, Narva, Estonia
or online at tv.artun.ee