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-)