3 april, kl 18:  Anna Puigjaner

Anna Puigjaner är en arkitekt, redaktör och forskare och medgrundare av arkitektbyrån MAIO, som bland annat ställt ut på Arkitekturbiennalen i Venedig och MOMA. Puigjaner vann 2016 Wheelwright Prize, Harvard GSD, för sin forskning om Kitchenless Cities.

Kitchenless Cities
There was a time in New York when the house was understood as an open system. It was designed, not as a single entity, but as a set of connected fragments that could change depending on the need. The space was flexible and adaptable on demand, and expanded also by means of collective domestic services and spaces. The kitchen was optional as the rest of the rooms and sometimes it was left apart, kitchenless.

This typology blurred the traditional limits between the public and the private sphere, between the domestic and the urban, and thanks to its flexibility and share-ability was able to shrink radically housekeeping costs, waste and labour. Still nowadays the idea of home is ultimately a cultural construction whose malleable limits go beyond its physicality. A home, and its kitchen, is therefore a diffuse entity.

Fri entré men föranmälan krävs.
Anmälan 

10 april, kl 18: Kim Cook

Kim Cook är chef för Art and Civic Engagement, Burning Man, festivalen som varje år samlar 10 000-tals medverkande i Nevadas öken för att skapa samhället Black Rock City. Tidigare var Cook bland annat chef för New Orleans Arts Council, där hon adresserade samhällsutmaningar via konst, design och teknologi.

Creative by design
When we as citizens are intentional about the use of design in the public realm we can nurture, facilitate, and even catalyse creativity, stronger social ties, and meaningful connections to each other – and to the places we inhabit. This talk will present a contrast between general urban realities (using the United States as primary reference) and the annual temporary city in the Desert—called Black Rock City and known as Burning Man—which serves as an opportunity to explore how temporality allows us to innovate, test new ideas and enact creative experiments. The lessons of Burning Man offer the possibility of translating those temporary strategies into active choices that make a lasting impact in other environments. From the experiential to the physical: design matters.

Samtalet följs av en replik av Ana Betancour, professor vid Arkitekthögskolan, Umeå universitet. På engelska.

Fri entré men föranmälan krävs.
Anmälan 

17 april, kl 18: Durga Chew-Bose

Durga Chew-Bose är en Montrealbaserad författare och redaktör och debuterade förra året med essäsamlingen Too Much and Not the Mood (Farrar Straus and Giroux) Hon är senior editor för SSENSE och hon har publicerats i The New Inquiry, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, GQ, Interview magazine och n+1.

On shallow stairs
”I think the writer has to be responsible to signs and dreams. Receptive and responsible,” said American author Joy Williams. “If you don’t do anything with it, you lose it. You stop getting these omens.”
The potential loss that Williams speaks of is, perhaps, one of my greatest fears as a writer. Imagine that. A lacking born from turning off one’s feelers – those funny, hard-to-define inclinations we might have, those radars and heart beams that keep us open. “On Shallow Stairs”—although I promise it will be rife with tangents—will explore art as alloy and art as a gathering of signs and omens, as Williams puts it. Topics discussed will include: the writings and paintings of Manny Farber, Mexico City, fonts, overnight fixes, Agnès Varda, Agnes Martin, Abbas Kiarostami, sardines, family vacations, glassware, Peter Doig, Marguerite Duras, Montreal metros, sandcastles and Proust, and of course, shallow stairs.

Samtalet följs av en replik av Ann-Sofie Noring, vice museichef, Moderna Museet. På engelska.

Fri entré men föranmälan krävs.
Anmälan 

24 april, kl 18: Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe

Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) är en Londonbaserad duo som använder sig av installationer, performance och video in sina forskningsbaserade projekt för att undersöka gränslandet mellan konst, arkitektur och geopolitik. Deras arbeten har bland annat ställts ut på Arkitekturbiennalen i Venedig, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin och Storefront for Art & Architecture, New York.

The Empire Remains Shop
Empire Shops were first developed in London in the 1920s to teach the British how to consume foodstuffs from the colonies and overseas territories. Although none of the stores ever opened, they intended to make foods such as sultanas from Australia, oranges from Palestine, cloves from Zanzibar, and rum from Jamaica available and familiar in the British Isles. The Empire Remains Shop, a public installation that opened in 2016, speculates on the possibility and implications of selling back the remains of the British Empire in London today. The Empire Remains Shop works as a platform to investigate and explore postcolonial spatial implications behind the ‘exotic’ and the ‘tropical’, conflict geologies, the financialisation of ecosystems, ‘unnatural’ behaviours, the ecological perception of ‘invasive’ and ‘native’ species, the architecture of retiring to former colonies, or the construction of the offshore and Special Economic Zones.

Samtalet följs av en replik av Lisa Enzenhofer, gästlärare KTH. På engelska.

Fri entré men föranmälan krävs.
Anmälan 

4 maj, kl. 18: Beatriz Colomina

Beatriz Colomina, professor i arkitekturhistoria och teori vid Princeton universitet, ger ett föredrag om kopplingen mellan sociala medier och bebyggelsemiljö.

Broadcasting Yourself: Social Media Urbanism
Perhaps the most important transformation in the social, cultural and economic life in the 21st Century has been the arrival of social media. A new space for design has opened up. Indeed, social media is the ultimate space for design. Through its multiple platforms, we not only communicate and collaborate with wider and wider groups, but also refashion ourselves. Images, videos, texts, emojis, stickers, tweets, gifs, memes, comments, posts, and reposts are deployed to construct a digital personality. There was no social media before 2000. There has been an astonishing, exponential acceleration in the number of channels, users, interconnections, and speed. A few seconds has become a space for design. This is a complete transformation of the way we live with huge implications for the city.

This talk will explore social media as a new form of urbanization, the architecture of how we live together. Social media has constructed a new kind of virtual city that has taken over many of the functions of the traditional city. We now inhabit a kind of hybrid space between virtual and real. As with the arrival of mass media in the early 20th Century, social media redraws again what is public and what is private, what is inside and what is outside. It even redefines and restructures physical space, the architecture of houses and cities.

This talk will treat social media as a material technology with specific physical effects. While there is a lot of discussion and research into social media in the areas of communication, sociology, economics and politics, the specific urban condition of social media remains unstudied. Treating social media as a new urban condition re-frames the conversation about this technological paradigm: the new forms of creativity and activism, challenges to privacy, collective decision-making, self-construction, new forms of labor, domesticity, and risk.
Samtalet följs av en replik.

Fri entré. Men föranmälan krävs.
Amälan

Intendent: James Taylor-Foster
Producent: Elisabet Schön
Grafisk design: Daly & Lyon