“You got to make your own world, you got to write yourself in.”
― Octavia Butler, Charlie Rose interview (2000)
“Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless, so it can be thought.“
― Audre Lorde, Poetry is Not a Luxury, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984) p. 64
Reconstructions is a one-year, part-time course on the advanced level. The course is interdisciplinary and practice-based and brings together an intimate group of around ten practitioners and researchers to be in dialogue and engagement with each other, and with invited guests. The course is led by Marie-Louise Richards, lecturer in Architecture, and is part of the Department for Research and Further Education in Architecture and Fine Art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.
The group meets monthly for five-day intensive sessions incorporating lectures, seminars, workshops, case studies, and site visits. The course welcomes applicants who are well-oriented in gender, queer, feminist, and critical race discourses, and have a theoretical or practical background in relation to these topics. Applicants may have a degree in art, architecture, urban studies, digital media, film, writing or other related fields.
Course Content
If emotional labour was placed at the centre of architecture history, theory and practice, what would emerge? In other words, what kind of spatial practice could be imagined if it was centred on the care and affective labour that is required to reimagine future architecture practices that transform the world as we know it?
The reimagining of a spatial practice that radically centres and rethinks affect, labour, knowledge, and care, seeks to imagine spatial practices which precede any racialised or gendered economy. It is a reconstruction of values, narratives, systems, and worlds.
Paying close attention to social vulnerabilities, their complexities and unequal distribution, allows for respect, value and credit to the emotional labour and care that is required to reimagine future practices. It involves not only imagining other modes and forms of spatial practice, but also reflectively recovering and foregrounding modes and forms of thinking, being, and doing that have been erased, forgotten, ignored, and devalued. It seeks to centre radical subversions of values and care – with the aim to facilitate critical frameworks that explore the reconstruction of the practice of space-making, through experimental approaches both in terms of envisioning doing, and living otherwise.
Course Structure
The group meets monthly for five-day intensive sessions with lectures, seminars, workshops, case studies and site visits. The sessions aim to facilitate a series of semi-public spaces, settings, programs and activities that centres and rethinks affect, labour, knowledge and care both in terms of envisioning future practice as well as future ways of living, through a variety of mediums and expressions: introducing feminist methodologies and approaches rooted in black radical feminist thought, black studies, cyberfeminism, techno-feminism, afro-futurism, critical spatial practices – as well as a series of related art, architectural practices and research.
| Credits | 30 ECTS (50%) |
| Level | Advanced level |
| Language | English |
| Entry Requirements | Degree of Master of Fine Arts, or a Master’s degree in another relevant field of study, or prior learning (equivalent professional experience) |
| Selection | Letter of motivation max 1 A4, CV and portfolio of 3 work samples. The letter should clearly state the applicant’s theoretical or practical background in relation to queer, gender, feminist, or critical race discourses and how the theme and topics of the course is relevant to the applicant’s practice. The work samples should be related to the course’s theme. Shortlisted applicants with equivalent merits may be called to an interview |
| Academic Year | Fall term: 2023-08-29–2024-01-14 Spring term: 2024-01-15–2024-06-02 |
| Responsible teacher | Marie-Louise Richards |
| Contact | marie-louise.richards@kkh.se, studera.postmaster@kkh.se |