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 14th 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