Umeå School of Architecture warmly welcomes students, staff and the public to a UMA Talks event titled Situated Practices – Social Engagements. Invited guests Magnus Ericson (IASPIS), Jamie Hignett (Unit 38), Heidi Svenningsen Kajita (bureaus) and Alejandro Haiek Coll (Lab Pro Fab) will shortly precent their work connected to the topic, followed by a round-table discussion moderated by UMA:s Amalia Katopodis.
Magnus Ericson is a Stockholm-based curator and educator working across design, architecture, urbanism, and art. He is currently Head of IASPIS Applied Arts, leading the program related to design, crafts, architecture, and spatial and urban practice. From 2014 to 2018 he developed and led a number of postgraduate courses on socially engaged critical practice at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm. Between 2009 and 2014, he was a Senior Advisor/Curator for the design-related program at Arkdes, Sweden’s National Centre for Architecture and Design, in Stockholm. From 2007 to 2009 he was assigned as a Project Manager at IASPIS to pursue and develop activities within the fields of design, crafts, and architecture. Together with Pelin Tan, he is the curator of Urgent Pedagogies. Urgent Pedagogies is a transdisciplinary project connecting various artistic practices such as, design, architecture, spatial and urban practice with social movements, civil society and activist initiatives. It focuses on critical spatial practices and has the ambition to engage with people from a multitude of experiences, situations, contexts, and geographies. Learning through open-ended and experimental approaches is central to the project, engaging with different perspectives, new encounters and critical dialogues, it is a growing network of alliances.
Jamie Hignett is an architect based in London and co-founder of Unit 38, an architectural co-operative. Unit 38 offers design services to working-class communities typically excluded from processes of urban change—ranging from migrants and refugees to low-income groups threatened with displacement from their neighbourhoods. Their work combines co-research and design at the intersection of low-carbon architecture, democratic ownership, economic policy, and political action. During his IASPIS residency in Stockholm, he will carry out research and engage with groups tackling the urban politics of Stockholm, exploring self-management, democratic control, and alternative economic models. He will examine how these models operate to understand what lessons and strategies can be learned from Sweden and applied in the UK. Jamie Hignett studied at the Bartlett School of Architecture and the London School of Architecture. He is a frequent visiting tutor at the Sheffield School of Architecture, Westminster University, and the Architectural Association. He has self-released music, and his research has been part of Theatrum Mundi’s cohort (How We Relate to the Body, 2022), aired on Resonance FM (A Brief History of Rave, 2020), and supported by the Adam Architecture Travel Scholarship to document Fernand Pouillon’s housing projects in France and Algeria (2018).
Heidi Svenningsen Kajita is an Associate Professor in Landscape Architecture, Planning and Design at the University of Copenhagen and co-founder of bureaus. In her architectural research, Kajita works for social change in everyday spaces. Focusing on the history and transformation of welfare state housing areas, her research deals with users’ everyday practices, normative frameworks for the built environment, and architectural paperwork. Revealing techniques for combining social and technical expertise, she activates archives, documents, oral histories and other memory material that record often uncomfortable architectural histories associated with marginalization. The challenge of dealing with pasts, presents and futures of socio-ecological transformation is complex, and she therefore links architectural history, creative practice, and ethnographic strategies to situate perspectives and needs of different actors and resources. Bureaus are spatial designers, strategists and researchers contributing to the making of inclusive places. Where inclusion describes both the qualities of the work made but also the processes to bring it about. Their work spans spatial brief developments and strategies, design of interior, landscape and spaces in the city, curatorial and creative consultancy, and research.
Alejandro Haiek Coll, Associate Professor in Architecture and Urban Design, PhD Excellent Cum Laude International Mention from University of Genova and Magister in Science Honorific Mention in Architectural Design at the Central University of Venezuela. He is MA Studio Coordinator at Umeå School of Architecture and Founder of Laboratory of Intersectional Ecologies and the Laboratory of Experimental Applied Arts Lab Pro Fab. His area of expertise revolves around regenerative projects of civic engagement and social ecosystem reengineering, examining the relations between public landscapes, network governance and cultural capital. His research-based practice focuses on projects that integrate science, tacit knowledge and local intelligences. With projects that range from performances to large-scale public eco infrastructures, his laboratory works cooperatively alongside an international and interdisciplinary research network, exploring infrastructural ecosystems and material excess. His interventions in the texture of the city are transformative both socially and politically, from micro to macro scale. The projects open feedback loops between the different levels of knowledge, from designer to builder. His work reconciles the material excesses of industrial manufacturing, the waste produced by construction, with social and civic deficits including unrest, poverty and inequality. His work straddles art, architecture, design, geography, engineering and performance.
The UMA Talks are a free and accessible series of events. The series is devoted to advancing architectural discourse from both an international perspective and local perspective, and strives to enable the public, students, teachers, and researchers both within architecture and from other fields to get insight to and participate in the educational activities and academic research taking place at Umeå School of Architecture. Theorist, practitioners, artists, and other relevant guests are invited to speak or to participate in roundtable conversations or similar formats.
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