Doctoral Studies

The artistic research project Love Your Monsters: The Toxic Heritage of Contamination explores the challenges associated with managing contaminated sites through the lens of the architectural discipline and knowledge field of Rebuilding culture. By framing contamination as a specific form of difficult heritage, the project emphasizes that long-term sustainable management is not solely a matter of resource efficiency, but of engaging with the complexity of these environments from within. What is more, how they are experienced as heritage depends less on the contamination itself, but more on how they are managed, underlining the necessity of critically reflective architectural approaches to interventions in them. The project is thereby an experimental search for an architectural language capable of engaging with contamination in, and as a part of, the existing environment. How should we approach the repurposing of contaminated sites in terms of restoration ideologies, and are the ones we currently have sufficient? What aspects of these sites should be preserved, if any, especially if the contamination remains?

The doctoral education is conducted in collaboration between the Royal Institute of Art and Konstfack, and is funded by the Knowledge Foundation. (2025-)

Nobody Forgets Nothing is an artistic research project exploring how sculpture and materiality can reveal hidden or repressed narratives in public space. The starting point is Lövholmen – Stockholm’s last remaining central industrial area – shaped by pigment production, textile mills, and cement factories, and carrying traces of both local working-class histories and global, colonial trade routes.

The project listens to the site’s silent archive – pigments, ruins, material residues – that hold stories of labour, violence, resilience, and movement. Through sculptural interventions, it investigates how the past lingers in the city’s surfaces and structures, and how art can give form to what has been forgotten, erased, or pushed aside.

The project asks: How can materials themselves carry stories of colonialism, labour, and resistance? How do global historical traces colour our contemporary urban spaces? And how can art listen to what remains unsaid – to the repressed, the returning?

Nobody Forgets Nothing is conducted in collaboration between Royal Institute of Art and Konstfack. The doctoral study is funded by the Knowledge Foundation. (2025–)

2025
Oscar Lara
Mining Life – An exploration in three acts into the potential of socially engaged art practices to instigate social changes

The doctoral study was a collaboration between the Royal Institute of Art and Lund University.

2024
Oliva Plender
Many Maids Make Much Noise

The doctoral study was a collaboration between the Royal Institute of Art and the Swedish Artistic Research School/Lund University.

2024
Kajsa Dahlberg
Tidal Zones – Filming Between Life and Images

The doctoral study was a collaboration between the Royal Institute of Art and Lund University.

2022
Melanie Gilligan
Treating the Abstract of Capital Concretely: Films Against Capitalism

The doctoral study was a collaboration with Stockholm University of the Arts/Lund University

2021
Emanuel Almborg
Towards A Pedagogy of the Utopian Image

The doctoral study was a collaboration with the Royal Institute of Art, The Stockholm University of the Arts and Lund University.

2017
Ana Džokić (ramverk STEALTH-unlimited)
Upscaling, Training, Commoning

The doctoral study is a collaboration between the Royal Institute of Art and Lund University.

2016
Simon Goldin (ramverk Goldin+Senneby)
Zero Magic: Shifting the Valuation Convention

The doctoral study is a collaboration between the Royal Institute of Art and Lund University.