Open Lectures

Date: Tuesday, 12 May 2026, 13:30–15:00
Venue: Estonian Academy of Arts, Room A202
Admission: free and open to the public

The MAKK&MACA programme (Master of Contemporary Arts) at the Estonian Academy of Arts invites students, artists, educators, and the wider public to an open lecture by contemporary artist, performance maker, and curator Pankaj Tiwari on Tuesday, 12 May 2026.

In the lecture, Tiwari will introduce TENT: A School of Performative Practices — not as a proposal, but as an intervention. TENT is a nomadic, collective, and deliberately unfinished institution that refuses permanence, refuses neutrality, and refuses to wait for permission. Emerging from lived experience and structural exclusion, TENT is built from the ground up: without fixed walls, without inherited authority, and without the illusion that change can happen from within the same frameworks that produced the problem.

“Contemporary art institutions speak the language of inclusion, while their structures remain largely unchanged,” says Tiwari. “This is not a conversation about reform. It is an attempt at construction.”

The lecture moves between dream and reality, critique and action, asking a simple but urgent question: if institutions cannot change, what does it take to build new ones — and who gets to build them?

TENT operates as a temporary, mobile space of mutual learning and collective imagination. It uses interactive formats such as talks, residencies, dinners, and temporal togetherness at host institutions for specific durations to engage with their politics and practice. It is a space for imagining, thinking, listening, and responding to social injustices.

TENT at Kumu Art Museum and Rehearsals for Solidarity
In May 2026, to mark Kumu Art Museum’s 20th anniversary, TENT is erected in the museum’s inner courtyard. Around it, a twelve-day programme titled Rehearsals for Solidarity runs from 9–20 May 2026. The programme responds to a growing need to find common ground at a time when wars and geopolitical and ecological crises are deepening. The challenges affecting our shared lives have grown so large that they demand collaboration — yet we face an increasingly polarised society that undermines our very capacity to cooperate. Rehearsals for Solidarity tackles exactly this: practising the skill of finding common ground in an era when doing so feels ever more difficult. The programme encompasses performances, workshops, reading circles, lectures, communal meals, and more.

Rehearsals for Solidarity is organised collaboratively by Pankaj Tiwari, Kumu Art Museum, Kumu Youth Club, Lasnaidee, and students of the Estonian Academy of Arts’ MA Contemporary Art programme, and is curated by Frederik Klanberg. The initiative is supported by the City of Tallinn.

TENTative Practices — A Satellite Programme by EKA Students
As part of Rehearsals for Solidarity, students of the Estonian Academy of Arts have devised their own satellite programme, TENTative Practices, which unfolds across several days within and around the tent.

On Monday, 11 May, TENTative Practices opens with a communal pillow-making workshop. Instructions, materials, and tools are provided on site; the finished pillows will furnish a cosy reading nook inside the tent, complete with a small library that remains open for the duration of the programme — a space for quiet encounters and playful exploration. That afternoon, artist Ming Zhu presents the performance OOOcarina, an invitation to slow down, attune to one’s breathing, body, and the ground beneath, and to enter a shared space of resonance.

On Wednesday, 13 May, the programme turns to mending and washing — an activation of the tent’s surroundings and the museum’s “backyard” through communal care. The result is a temporary clothesline exhibition to which visitors are invited to contribute their own everyday garments, becoming co-authors of an evolving collective composition. The evening closes with an adapted game of football on the hill beside the museum courtyard — a team-building exercise with the shared goal of getting the ball uphill.

On Monday, 18 May, a new week brings a new format: TENT Radio, featuring interviews, experimental sound works, radio theatre, essays, and more. Local and international artists discuss the relationship between artist and institution live on air. TENT Radio can be listened to at https://oh.eka-gd-ma.ee/.

On Tuesday, 19 May, the programme gathers the texts, drawings, and photographs produced over the preceding days into a collectively made zine — a document of all that has been shared during Rehearsals for Solidarity. The day continues with communal cooking: each participant chops one onion, one carrot, and one clove of garlic, and everything goes into the pot. Many small contributions make one shared meal, enjoyed together.

The full programme is available at https://kumu.ekm.ee/en/syndmus/pankaj-tiwari-tent-school-rehearsals-for-solidarity/.

About Pankaj Tiwari
Pankaj Tiwari is a contemporary artist, performance maker, writer, and curator from Balrampur, India. Currently based in Amsterdam, he holds a Master’s degree in Theatre & Curation from DAS Theatre Amsterdam. Since 2026, he has been working as a trajectory artist with the international arts centre CAMPO in Ghent.

His works bring Eastern perspectives into Western discourse on socio-political issues. Tiwari is the winner of the 3Package Deal Award (2021–2022) from Amsterdam Funds for the Arts and served as a curator for Gessnerallee Zurich from 2020 to 2024. He is currently the artistic director of Stichting Studio Current in Amsterdam.

Tiwari’s work has been invited and supported by numerous international festivals and production houses, including Thalia Theatre Hamburg, Romaeuropa Rome, Steirischer Herbst Graz, MC93 Bobigny, Theater Rotterdam, Frascati Theatre Amsterdam, Kaaitheater Brussels, DE SINGEL Antwerp, Grand Theatre Groningen, SpielArt Munich, Holland Festival Amsterdam, Zürcher Theaterspektakel Zurich, University of Minnesota Minneapolis, Radialsystem Berlin, Santarcangelo Festival Italy, and performingborderslive UK, among others.

The 2025/2026 academic year open lecture series will be held in collaboration with the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture and the Faculty of Architecture. The theme of this academic year is “Architecture and the Ethics of Care” and the lectures will be curated by KVI Senior Researcher Dr. Ingrid Ruudi.

On May 1that 6 pm Iulia Statica will give a lecture “Landscapes of care with wildflowers: Women, plants and domesticity in (post)socialist Romania”.

This research project examines the ways in which women’s domestic and ecological labour under state socialism reshaped urban landscapes in Romania, revealing care as an environmental and gendered spatial practice. It focuses on two semi-domestic spaces of housing blocks—balconies and urban courtyards—tracing how generational knowledge of plants and flowers enabled women to reimagine these spaces in ways that contradicted state planning and pronatalist regulation. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, the talk explores the ways in which “care” was redefined within this repressive context, mediated in women’s everyday practices linking natality to landscape-making through the intimacies of what we might term “clandestine care”. The project experiments with multiple media, including installation, video and photography, to document and explore the multiple layers of these gendered networks of care.

Iulia Statica is Senior Lecturer at the School of Architecture and Landscape at the University of Sheffield, UK and the 2025/26 Mellon Fellow in Democracy and Landscape at Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Institute in Washington DC. She previously held postdoctoral positions at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, and Cornell University. Her research focuses on the legacies of socialist-built environments in Eastern Europe, particularly mass housing, and the gendered experiences of these spaces. Statica uses documentary film in her research; her film My Socialist Home premiered in her exhibition Archiving the Home in London in 2021. She is the author of Urban Phantasmagorias: Domesticity, Production, and the Politics of Modernity in Communist Bucharest.

The 2025/2026 academic year open lecture series is organised in collaboration between the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture and the Faculty of Architecture, and is connected to the research project Built environments of care from the late Socialist to post-Socialist Estonia (PSG 2025–2029).

The lecture series is supported by:

Previous open architecture lectures can be viewed at www.avatudloengud.ee

On May 14, 2026, the Estonian Academy of Arts will host an open conference titled “Metamorphosis as a Creator of the Future” in room A501, featuring internationally acknowledged Italian philosopher Emanuele Coccia as the keynote speaker.

The conference will be held in English.

The conference will focus on the philosophy of Emanuele Coccia, with metamorphosis as the key term. Life is an incessant series of metamorphoses that happen everywhere, and the first natural technology is the cocoon, where preparation for transformation takes place. The keynote speaker at the conference will be Emanuele Coccia. The floor will also be given to artists and thinkers who, through their work, have explored change and its impact on the world around us.

Programme:

15.00 Opening words and introduction

I session: Contemporary Art and Language as a Form of Transformations

Bjarki Bragason (artist, educator, Iceland University of the Arts):
The Garden That Was: Memory, Ecology and Transformation

Ene-Liis Semper (artist, stage director, educator, Estonian Academy of Arts)
Large-Scale Performances as the Agents of Change in Society

Hasso Krull (poet, essayist, philosopher, Tallinn University)
A Metamorphic Event: Hommages à Artur Alliksaar and Emanuele Coccia

16.00 Coffee break

16.15 II session: Philosophy of Metamorphosis

Marek Tamm (cultural historian, theorist, Tallinn University)

Philosophy as Metamorphosis: Emanuele Coccia

Emanuele Coccia (philosopher, Italy/France, EHESS)

Metamorphosis as the Creator of Future

17.30 -18.30 final panel: Metamorphosis as the Creator of Future

Coccia, Bragason, Semper, Krull, Tamm – moderated by Kirke Kangro

Emanuele Coccia is Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He has been a visiting professor and researcher at numerous international institutions, including universities in Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Düsseldorf, Columbia University, Harvard, Penn University and New York University. His work bridges philosophy, ecology, contemporary art, architecture, and visual theory, proposing a renewed understanding of life, form, and habitation on a planetary scale.

He is the author of several books translated into many languages, including The Life of Plants (Polity, 2018; Gallimard, 2016), Metamorphoses (Polity, 2021; Rivages, 2020), and Philosophy of the Home (Penguin, 2024; Rivages, 2024) and A Treatise on Modern Love (Flammarion and Einaudi 2026) . Together with photographer Viviane Sassen, he published Modern Alchemy (JBE Books, 2022), a book on photographic theory and image-thinking; with Paolo Roversi, Lettres sur la lumière (Gallimard, 2024), a philosophical epistolary on light as a principle of visibility and creation; and with Alessandro Michele, creative director of Valentino, The Life of Forms. Philosophy of Re-enchantment (HarperCollins, 2024). His forthcoming book, New Natures. Planetary Museums (Park Books, 2026), co-authored with author and curator Béatrice Grenier and architect Jeanne Gang, examines the emergence of planetary museums as living ecologies at the intersection of nature, architecture, and culture.

In 2019 and 2021, he contributed to Nous les Arbres, presented at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris and the Power Station of Art in Shanghai, where he is also a member of the Academic Committee. Together with Olivier Saillard, he curated The Many Lives of a Garment (ITS Arcademy, Trieste 2024) and Borderless (ITS Arcademy, Trieste, 2025), two exhibitions reflecting on the philosophical and social metamorphoses of fashion.

With Yuko Hasegawa, he co-curated Dancing with All at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, centered on ecology, coexistence, and the poetics of movement. He is a member of the Scientific Committee of the Power Station of Art of Shanghai. In 2024, Coccia was awarded the Mondriaan Prize for his theoretical and curatorial work bridging philosophy, art, and architecture.

Bjarki Bragason (b. 1983) studied at the Iceland University of the Arts, Universität der Künste Berlin and CalArts in Los Angeles. He is Associate Professor and Dean of the Fine Art Department at the Iceland University of the Arts and has taught at institutions internationally since 2014. His work has been represented in numerous solo- and group exhibitions internationally, and is in the collection of museums and private collections.

Hasso Krull (b. 1964) is an Estonian poet, translator and philosopher who has published nineteen books of poetry and eleven collections of essays that include literary criticism as well as writings concerning art, cinema and society. During 1990–2017 he was teaching cultural theory at the Estonian Institute of Humanities (special courses on continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, creation myths and oral tradition). From 2019 he has been teaching creative writing in the Estonian Academy of Arts. His latest books are The Eternal Recurrence (2025) and Twilight Remembrance (2025). He currently works as a researcher at Tallinn University.

Ene-Liis Semper (b. 1969) is an Estonian video, performance, and theatre director, and professor in the Department of Scenography at the Estonian Academy of Arts. In 2004, she co-founded Teater NO99 with Tiit Ojasoo, where she worked as artistic director and stage director until the theatre closed in 2018. Semper has created numerous set and costume designs for both drama and opera productions, and is known for her visually powerful and grandiose style. Her solo exhibitions have been held at prestigious museums, including the Kumu Art Museum (2011) and the Estonian Museum of Contemporary Art (EKKM) (2024). Her most recent major production projects include the concert-performance “Where Are You?” (2026), “The Master and Margarita” (2024, Riga Dailes Theater), “Macbeth” (2023, Estonian Drama Theatre/ERSO/Estonian Concert), “Now We Can Talk About It” (2023, Theater Expedition), and many more.

Marek Tamm is professor of cultural history in Tallinn University and head of the Institute of History, Archaeology and Art History. His primary research fields are cultural history of medieval Europe, theory and methodology of history, and cultural memory studies. He has recently published Breakthroughs in Cultural Psychology (ed. with Jaan Valsiner; Tallinn University Press, 2024), The Fabric of Historical Time (co-authored with Zoltán Boldizsár Simon; Cambridge University Press, 2023), and The Companion to Juri Lotman: A Semiotic Theory of Culture (ed. with Peeter Torop; Bloomsbury, 2022).

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New Date!

The 2025/2026 academic year open lecture series will be held in collaboration with the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture and the Faculty of Architecture. The theme of this academic year is “Architecture and the Ethics of Care” and the lectures will be curated by KVI Senior Researcher Dr. Ingrid Ruudi.

Architecture will be addressed from the perspective of the ethics of care: how does architecture take care of people’s physical, emotional and social needs, both today and in a historical perspective?

On April 3oth at 6 pm Dr Emma Cheatle will give a lecture “Lying in the Dark Room: Architectures of British Maternity”.

This research, and my book of the same name, studies the spatial, architectural experience of childbirth, through both a critical history of maternity (lying in) spaces and buildings and a creative exploration of those that we use today.

Where conventional architectural histories objectify buildings (in parallel with the objectification of the maternal body), the book presents a creative-critical autotheory of the architecture of lying-in. It uses feminist, subjective modes of thinking, which travel across disciplines, registers and arguments. The research assesses the transformation of maternity spaces—from the female bedchamber of the eighteenth-century marital home, to the lying-in hospitals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries purpose built by man-midwives, to the late-twentieth-century spaces of home and the modern hospital maternity wing—and the parallel shifts in maternal practices. The spaces are not treated as mute or neutral backdrops to maternal history, but as a series of vital, entangled atmospheres, materials, practices and objects that are produced by, and, in turn, produce particular social and political conditions, gendered structures and experiences.

Moving across spaces, systems, protagonists and their subjectivities, I show how historic hospital design and protocol altered ordinary birth at home and continues to shape maternal spatial experience today.

Dr Emma Cheatle is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at University of Sheffield. She trained as an architect in the UK and has a PhD in Architecture from the Bartlett, UCL which was awarded RIBA President’s Award for Outstanding PhD Thesis, 2014. Her research is interdisciplinary and examines the political, cultural and social implications of architecture, art and urban space, with a particular interest in addressing health, gender, race and disability inequalities. Her monograph Part-Architecture: The Maison de Verre, Duchamp, Domesticity and Desire in 1930s Paris (Routledge 2017) is a complex architectural humanities project, which engages critical and creative writing and drawing to analyse the building the Maison de Verre and the artwork “the Large Glass”, placing new primary and archival material in the context of social, sexual and medical histories of 1920s and 30s Paris. Her second book, Lying in the Dark Room: the Architectures of British Maternity (Routledge 2024), examines how the spatial histories of lying-in and maternal practices continue to shape the maternal body today. Emma is the UK Editor for the Bloomsbury Global Encyclopaedia of Women in Architecture 1960–2015 (Bloomsbury 2025), and part of several feminist projects including the Feminist Art and Architecture Collaborative (FAAC). Her collaboration with Hélène Frichot, University of Melbourne, led to a major edited collection of articles on the feminist theorist Jennifer Bloomer, for the Journal of Architecture (2024).

The lectures are intended for all disciplines, not only for students and professionals in the field of architecture.

All lectures are held on Thursdays at 6 pm in the EKA main auditorium. All lectures are in English and free of charge.

The 2025/2026 academic year open lecture series is organised in collaboration between the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture and the Faculty of Architecture, and is connected to the research project Built environments of care from the late Socialist to post-Socialist Estonia (PSG 2025–2029).

The lecture series is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

Previous open architecture lectures can be viewed at www.avatudloengud.ee

The 2025/2026 academic year open lecture series will be held in collaboration with the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture and the Faculty of Architecture. The theme of this academic year is “Architecture and the Ethics of Care” and the lectures will be curated by KVI Senior Researcher Dr. Ingrid Ruudi.

On April 9 at 6 pm Katarina Bonnevier will give a lecture “Living Organisms – Queerying Architecture with Trolls and Clay” at EKA lecture hall A-101.

She says: Let’s go on a date with my Heartlands. The talk will depart from a Pit of Clay, wander through the Secret Garden and into the Living Legend of the former casino in Malmö. A site that me and my pack MYCKET are courting right now. In my practice I engage with folklore, legends, and the unhuman to imagine relational futures – because the visions of trolls are sometimes helpful to overcome the technocrats’ devastating business as usual.  

Dr. Katarina Bonnevier practices through the art and architecture collective MYCKET working with co-creation across species, across disciplines, and across realities. Their practice blends artistic research (supported by Swedish Research Council and Linnaeus University) with hands-on making of public places, installations, and social situations. An architect by training, Bonnevier connects queer and feminist perspectives with ecological care and spatial justice through storytelling and hands-on crafting.

MYCKETs work has received national and international recognition, including the Ganneviksstipendiet (2021), and Architectural Review’s and the Architects’ Journal’s joint W-award (2024) for Heaven by MYCKET at Oslo National Museum. Her dissertation Behind Straight Curtains: Towards a Queer Feminist Theory of Architecture (Stockholm: Axl Books, 2007) from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, is available open access (DiVA portal, more than 35 000 downloads). In her early career she was engaged in Kalamaja, Tallinn, and was awarded the National Endowment of Estonia’s Cultural Prize for Young Architects (1995).

Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Faculty of Architecture of EKA presents a dozen unique practitioners and valued theorists in the field in Tallinn every academic year.

The lectures are intended for all disciplines, not only for students and professionals in the field of architecture.

Spring programme:

• 26.02 at 18:00 in A-101 Kaisa Karvinen “From Care to Concrete: Exhibiting Architecture”
• 26.03 at 18:00 in A-101  Jos Boys “Doing Disability Differently in Architecture”
• 9.04 at 18:00 in A-101 Katarina Bonnevier (Stockholm)
• 30.04 at 18:00 in A-101 Emma Cheatle (The University of Sheffield) “Lying in the Dark Room: Architectures of British Maternity”
• 14.05 at 18:00 in A-101 Iulia Statica (The University of Sheffield)

All lectures are held on Thursdays at 6 pm in the EKA main auditorium. All lectures are in English and free of charge.

The 2025/2026 academic year open lecture series is organised in collaboration between the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture and the Faculty of Architecture, and is connected to the research project Built environments of care from the late Socialist to post-Socialist Estonia (PSG 2025–2029).

The lecture series is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

Previous open architecture lectures can be viewed at www.avatudloengud.ee

On Wednesday, the 18th of March, a series of written thesis presentations by the graduating students of Craft Studies will be held across different workshops at EKA. 

There are 8 texts as part of the components required for graduation, reflecting on a diverse range of topics and approaches relevant to students’ individual practices and the expanded field of design and craft, with links to making and to the relations of legwork, handwork, and headwork. In intimate reading sessions around the studios, graduates share fragments from their research and creative practice.

All texts were composed through research, writing and editing supervised by Else Lagerspetz, Lieven Lahaye and Taavi Hallimäe.

17:00 The silent hovering of forks by Lyly Letzer, Smithy, B106.4.

17:30 Fit olemise kunst: Kehaloomepraktika by Joanne-Heleene Sõrmus, Prototyping Lab, B204.

17:45 Hidden in Plain Sight by Marite Kuus-Hill, Graphic Design Department, C305.

18:00 That Which is Carried by the Spaces in Between by Mariam Mestvirishvili, Weaving Studio, D505.

18:15 Orienting Home: exploring the resonance of home in a post-colonial world by Sylvia Burgess, Jewellery Studio, B504.

18:30 Beyond Wearability: Accessories as Fluid Signs by Peixuan Lin, Accessory Studio, B510.

18:45 Held in Suspension: Ceramic Reproduction and The Lives of Found Objects by Maia Hellman, Ceramics Workshop, B602.

19:00 Moulds for the Wilderness: From the Borders to the Void by Odie Lap Chun Chow, Plaster Workshop, D602.1.

19:15 Gathering with food and refreshments, A200.

Nairobi, a city of close to five million people, congregates many hopes, experiences and struggles. Yet, across the colonial archive, its challenges have been defined primarily as those concerning ‘vagrants’ and ‘squatters,’ for instance; identities that congregate in the figure of the African. Following independence, the targets of formal city management lament and destruction remain similar: the ‘slum,’ ‘informality’ and urban ‘vice,’ whose geographies map onto the homes and bodies of those long targeted by colonial authorities. Informed by the “abolition ecology” community work of many of this city’s residents, and long-term research in its ontological margins, in this presentation I think about Nairobi’s dynamics through water. Ultimately, my argument is that while the “problem” of the “native,” squatter, vagrant or slum is seen to be defining of this urban agglomeration across the years, when Nairobi is thought from its experiences of water, coloniality and disobedience emerge as its primary dialectical currents, allowing for more (un)just histories to come into view that can allow us to vision more equal belongings and materialities in this East African city.

The Open lecture is being organized by EKA Urban Studies and TLU School of Humanities. 

Wangui Kimari is an anthropologist based at the American University Nairobi Abroad Program. She is also a research associate at the African Centre for Cities (ACC), University of Cape Town. Her work draws on many local histories and interdisciplinary theoretical approaches – including oral narratives, assemblage theory, urban political ecology and the black radical tradition – to think through urban spatial management in Nairobi from the vantage point of its most marginalized residents. Wangui is also a regional editor of the online publication Africa Is a Country (AIAC), an Urban Studies Foundation (USF) trustee, on the editorial collective of Antipode and Urban Political Ecology journals, and a co-organizer of the UTA-Do African Cities Workshop.

The 2025/2026 academic year open lecture series will be held in collaboration with the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture and the Faculty of Architecture. The theme of this academic year is “Architecture and the Ethics of Care” and the lectures will be curated by KVI Senior Researcher Dr. Ingrid Ruudi.

On March 26 at 6 pm Jos Boys will give a lecture “Doing Disability Differently in Architecture” at room A-501.

Disabled people are almost always treated as an afterthought in built environment education and practice. But what if we instead start from disability, valuing our rich bio- and neurodiversity as a creative generator for design and as a critical means of challenging normative building and urban design? In this talk, Jos will explore how, over the last 18 years, DisOrdinary Architecture has been collaborating internationally with disabled artists, designers and architects to co-develop innovative and even radical ways of thinking and doing architecture.

Dr. Jos Boys is co-founder and co-director, with disabled artist Zoe Partington, of The DisOrdinary Architecture Project, a UK-based platform which brings disabled artists into built environment education and practice to critically and creatively re-think access and inclusion. Originally trained in architecture, she was co-founder of Matrix feminist architecture and research collective in London UK in the 1980s, and currently leads on the development of the Matrix Open online archive. Always a design activist, Jos has also been a journalist, critic, researcher, consultant, educator, photographer and artist; and has published many books and articles. These include authoring Doing Disability Differently: an alternative handbook on architecture, dis/ability, and designing for everyday life (Routledge 2014); editing Disability, Space, Architecture: A Reader (Routledge 2017) and co-editing Neurodivergence and Architecture (Elsevier 2022).

Within the framework of a series of open lectures, the Faculty of Architecture of EKA presents a dozen unique practitioners and valued theorists in the field in Tallinn every academic year.

The lectures are intended for all disciplines, not only for students and professionals in the field of architecture.

Spring programme:

• 26.02 at 18:00 in A-101 Kaisa Karvinen “From Care to Concrete: Exhibiting Architecture”
• 26.03 at 18:00 in A-501  Jos Boys (London)
• 9.04 at 18:00 in A-101 Katarina Bonnevier (Stockholm)
• 30.04 at 18:00 in A-101 Emma Cheatle (The University of Sheffield) “Lying in the Dark Room: Architectures of British Maternity”
• 14.05 at 18:00 in A-101 Iulia Statica (The University of Sheffield)

All lectures are held on Thursdays at 6 pm in the EKA main auditorium. All lectures are in English and free of charge.

The lecture series is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

Previous open architecture lectures can be viewed at www.avatudloengud.ee

On March 12 at 6 pm, Finnish engineer, scientist and environmental researcher Eero Paloheimo will give a special lecture “Ecological city planning” in the EKA auditorium.

Eero Kalervo Paloheimo has defended his doctoral theses at the University of Munich and the University of Helsinki.

He worked at the company Eero Paloheimo & Matti Ollila from 1965 to 1994, and then was a professor (timber construction) at the Helsinki University of Technology from 1995 to 2000. In 2009, Paloheimo founded Eero Paloheimo EcoCity Ltd., a company specializing in the research and construction of eco-cities.

As a researcher of environmental problems and sustainable development opportunities, Paloheimo has traveled throughout Europe, Africa and Asia. Since 2007, he has consulted on the establishment of eco-cities in China, based on the ideas he originally presented in his book “Syntymättötien sukupolvien Eurooppa” (1996, in Estonian 2004 ). He has also repeatedly introduced the possibilities of establishing eco-cities in Estonia.

Paloheimo served as a representative of the Green Party Vihreä Liitto in the Finnish Parliament from 1987 to 1995 and has been a member of several authoritative international committees dealing with environmental problems.

He is the author of more than ten books on the nature and state of the world.

The lecture will be held in English and is free and open to all interested parties.

The 2025/2026 academic year open lecture series will be held in collaboration with the Institute of Art History and Visual Culture and the Faculty of Architecture. The theme of this academic year is “Architecture and the Ethics of Care” and the lectures will be curated by KVI Senior Researcher Dr. Ingrid Ruudi.

 

On February 26 at 6 pm Kaisa Karvinen will give a lecture “From Care to Concrete: Exhibiting Architecture”.

Architect, curator, and researcher Kaisa Karvinen’s lecture examines exhibitions within architectural discourse in a time of ecological crisis, when questions of repair and maintenance become increasingly urgent. The analysis draws on Karvinen’s exhibitions, including Stripped Frame, at Merihaka, Helsinki (2022), which addressed the demolition and reuse of modernist concrete buildings; FIX: Care and Repair, at Architecture & Design museum, Helsinki (2024), which approached maintenance and care as forms of skilled labour and as aesthetic questions; and Teo Ala-Ruonas Industry Muscle: Five Scores for Architecture, Nordic Countries Pavilion, Biennale Architettura, Venice (2025), which examined the entanglements of fossil culture, architectural production, and the body.

Kaisa Karvinen works across exhibition-making and academic research. She is currently preparing an exhibition for the Finnish Pavilion at the 2027 Venice Architecture Biennale and is undertaking doctoral research at the University of Oulu. Karvinen is also a co-founder of the Trojan Horse collective.