Book launch of the edited volume “The Manor as a Phenomenon of Baltic Cultural History: Crossdisciplinary Perspectives”

Roundtable with Karsten Brüggemann (Tallinn University), Tiina-Mall Kreem (Gesellschaft für deutschbaltische Kultur in Estland) and Anneli Randla (Estonian Academy of Arts), moderated by Ulrike Plath (Tallinn University).

The edited volume:
Manors are one of the most well-known and beloved phenomena in Estonian cultural history
– they are widely studied and visited, written and spoken about, photographed and filmed,
restored, bought and sold. In fact, the manor is one of the few elements of Baltic German
heritage that has been domesticated into Estonian national cultural memory and heritage landscapes. However, it could also be argued that all this has flattened their public image.

This book is based on the conviction that the manor is key to a better understanding of Baltic history and culture, as well as of the transfers between Estonian and Baltic German cultures. For this, however, we need to look beyond the manor house and its aristocratic owners, and apply multidisciplinary approaches in order to find new perspectives. In this edited volume, scholars from a variety of disciplines explore the manor as a phenomenon around which many
of the major themes of the transnational history of the Baltic space unfold.

New perspectives are opened up on the early history of the manor, the importance of material culture and art as a source of manor history, the role of research and restoration practices in shaping the meaning of the manor, the cultural imagery and representations associated with the manor, and the ambivalent relationship between Baltic Germans and Estonians.

Editors: Kristina Jõekalda, Linda Kaljundi, Ulrike Plath

Authors: Riin Alatalu, Toomas Hiio, Hilkka Hiiop, Kristina Jõekalda, Inna Põltsam-Jürjo,
Linda Kaljundi, Andreas Kalkun, Marju Kõivupuu, Kadi Polli, Heiki Pärdi, Maris Saagpakk, Hannes Vinnal

Publisher: Tallinn University Press, 2025

The roundtable is in Estonian. The book is sold with a reduced price during the event.

The seminar takes a close look at one of the most diverse artists in the Baltic art scene, Friedrich Ludwig von Maydell (1795–1846), and asks which kind of new knowledge do his letters to architect Wilhelm Stier (1799–1856) reveal about Baltic art and cultural life in the first half of the nineteenth century, incl. about the contacts with German artists both in Germany and in Italy. Their correspondence, stretching over several decades, was recently found in the archive of the Berlin Technical University’s Architecture Museum. It enables fresh insights into several topics of Baltic history, also beyond art history.

The seminar’s four roundtables feature discussants from Estonian Academy of Arts, Tallinn University, University of Tartu, Art Museum of Estonia, Gesellschaft für deutschbaltische Kultur in Estland et al. The seminar is organised and moderated by Kristina Jõekalda and Tiina-Mall Kreem. The program is in Estonian.

PROGRAM

12.00 Maydell’s correspondence and travels against the background of art history
Tiina Abel, Kristina Jõekalda, Liisa-Helena Lumberg-Paramonova, Maris Saagpakk

13.15 Maydell, church art and the status of an artist
Reet Pius, Kadi Polli, Anne Untera

14.00-14.30 pause

14.30 Maydell in Tartu (Dorpat): drawings, prints and everyday life
Reet Bender, Triin Kröönström, Moonika Teemus, Kristiina Tiideberg

15.30 The letters’ significance for history and cultural history
Linda Kaljundi, Kairit Kaur, Tiina-Mall Kreem

Pablo Ignacio Hermansen Ulibarri – Visiting Lecturer at the Estonian Academy of Arts

Pablo Ignacio Hermansen Ulibarri is a designer with a PhD in Architecture and Urban Studies. He teaches and conducts research at the School of Design at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. His work focuses on co-design, interaction design, socio-natural ecosystems, photo-ethnography, performative politics in public space, more-than-human prototyping, and public services as public space.

He will be visiting the Estonian Academy of Arts from April 14–16 and will give a public lecture, “Counter Designing: Animals and Algorithms as Creative Agents,” on April 16 at 18:00 in room A501.

In January, EKA Interaction Design students visited his university in Chile to develop collaborative projects and academic exchange.

In this seminar, we will discuss the results of the EKA research project ‘Art Historical Contact Zones: Popular and Fictional Mediations of Art History in Estonia’ (2023–2024).

Our aim was to explore different ways of representing art (and its history), i.e. to investigate how art has been presented by media external to the art world, and whether and how this has changed the meanings of art, compared to the interpretations of academic researchers. Each of us dealt with a different “medium”: fiction, film, journalism, heritage construction, schematic and photographic narrative, television programs, art criticism.

At the seminar we will also present the final product of our project – a special issue of journal Vikerkaar (2025/4–5), our section edited by Johannes Saar. In addition to him, the authors of the articles are Epp Lankots, Kädi Talvoja, Liisa-Helena Lumberg-Paramonova, Tiina Abel, Kristina Jõekalda and Krista Kodres.

On April 17 at 13.00 Marta Konovalov’s second peer-reviewed process “Designer, the resilient gardener”, will take place in room A-501.
The reviewers of the process are Dr Marium Durrani and Prof Danielle Wilde (Umeå University, University of Southern Denmark).
Supervisors are Dr Kristi Kuusk ( EKA) and Dr Julia Valle Noronha (Aalto University).

Marta Konovalov invites you to view her garden and her research artefacts. She presents the second phase of her doctoral research on repair and regenerative textile design.
With her practice-based research she investigates how a designer can promote emotional durability and support the development of the aesthetics of affect in the context of fashion and textiles. To better understand the potential of regenerative textile design Marta Konovalov discusses the common values of my textile repair and gardening practice from the overlapping perspective of a designer, mender and an amateur gardener. She has set out to explore how a designer can address crises and encourage response-ability resilient practice through the interconnected activities.
With this work she aims to promote the discussion over interfering in the standardised, growth oriented processes of textile production and to empower the individual and nature in the multifaceted crises.

Marta Konovalov is a designer-researcher, craftivist and educator focusing on repair and regenerative textile design. She is a lecturer and doctoral student at Estonian Academy of Arts.

On April 16 at 11.00 Kadri Liis Rääk’s second peer-reviewed exhibition “Morphogenesis”, will take place in the ARS Project Space, Pärnu mnt 154.

The exhibition’s peer reviewers are Dr. Erik Alalooga and Professor Esa Kirkkopelto.
The supervisor of the doctoral thesis is Dr. Liina Unt.

The second creative project is part of Kadri Liis Rääk’s doctoral thesis, “Touch and Tactility as a Means for Shared Immersion in Art” which focuses on embodied, multisensory experiences within the exhibition context. Using methods of expanded scenography, Rääk explores how to create immersive spaces for alternative encounters through interactive bodily sculptures, atmospheric mood, and tactility. Through sculptures grounded in her own bodily experiences, Rääk examines the singularity of experience and the boundaries of self and the Other. She is initerested in what beliefs and values are carried with oneself and the surrounding world, and how these are expressed through the experience of touch.

Kadri Liis Rääk is a multidisciplinary artist and researcher, focusing on creating immersive and tactile environments. Operating simultaneously in the expanded fields of art and design, she investigates how tactile interactions with artworks shift perceptions and foster dialogues extending beyond the visible. She studied scenography (BA) and contemporary art (MA) at the Estonian Academy of Arts and autonomous design (MA) at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent (KASK, Belgium). Her works engage with bodily and symbolic narratives, addressing entanglements and dialogues between humans and other life forms. She has participated in exhibitions and residencies in Peru, Czech Republic, Belgium, Denmark, Iceland, and Estonia.

We look forward to seeing you at the opening of the CTC – Climate Truth Crisis exhibition on 11.04, at 14:00, in the open area in front of the Estonian Academy of Arts (Põhja pst 7).

The CTC – Climate Truth Crisis project deals with the spread of misinformation and understanding the climate crisis. The project involves educating young designers in these areas, creating a website that gathers information about the topic, publishing a podcast series, a dictionary and a collection of articles. In addition, students are visualizing the topic in various media. More information on the project website: https://www.climatetruthcrisis.eu/

The first workshop of the project will take place at the Estonian Academy of Arts on 7-11 April, during which students will write down concepts related to the topic, visualize them and on Friday, 11 April, open an exhibition in a public space in front of the EKA to introduce the topic to a wider audience.

The workshop is held in cooperation with the EKA Graphic Design Department and the Department of Semiotics of the University of Tartu. The students will be supervised by semioticians, conspiracy theory and disinformation researchers Mari-Liis Madisson and Daniel Tamm, Laura Vilbiks from the Estonian Foundation for Nature (ELF), and graphic designers Laura Merendi, Ott Kagovere and Kert Viiart. In addition to the supervisors, there will be students and lecturers from Bosnia, Spain, the Netherlands, England, Iceland and Lithuania.

In addition to the workshop, there will also be lectures open to the wider audience:

09.04, 16:00, A502 (EKA, Põhja pst 7)
Artist Kristina Õllek with a presentation Absorbing Hypoxic Water

10.04, 16:00, A300 (EKA, Põhja pst 7)
Graphic designer Maria Muuk with a presentation Graphic Design as a Degrowth Practice

The project will last for three years, 2025-2028, and workshops will be held at various partner universities:

Academy of Fine Arts Sarajevo,

Estonian Academy of Arts,

ELISAVA,

Iceland University of the Arts,

Royal Academy of Art, The Hague,

University of the Arts London,

Vilnius Academy of Arts

The 2025 Spring semester session of the Open Lectures ”City as novel ecosystem” focuses on landscape architecture and, more specifically, urban nature. 

The lecture series is being put together by landscape architects Karin Bachmann, Merle Karro-Kalberg and Anna-Liisa Unt, who have co-founded and edited the landscape architecture magazine ÕU for 7 years and are currently leading the project “Curated Biodiversity”, which experiments with ways to make urban landscaping more diverse as an environment. Therefore, the open lectures in the spring will also turn their attention to the quality of the space between buildings and, using the speakers’ words and creations, show how to make the city more biodiverse and enjoyable and how people and other species that call the city their home can live in symbiosis.

On April 24 at 6 pm, Penfornis will take the stage in the EKA auditorium to introduce the 20-year practice of the landscape architecture office Taktyk, share the outcomes of he enquiries through design, point at critical future directions.

From Rotterdam to Barcelona, from Paris to Brussels and more lately Zurich, the practice Taktyk has since 2005, been envisaged as an evolving entity, adaptive and responsive to new heterogeneous and complex challenges. For the last 20 years Taktyk acts as a conductor, curator, and mediator of transformation processes using tacit knowledge of gardening, bricolage and painting. The lecture will highlight the emergence and evolution of our voice in the field and how we envision its future.

Taktyk is a landscape architecture office based in Paris and Brussels that experiments with introducing lush plant communities into existing spatial situations. The contrast between the natural and the built environment becomes very visible in their works, because special attention is given to creating new spatial quality that arises from the overlap between the two. New environments are always born from coworking with future users.

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.

Schedule of the Spring 2025 lectures:

March 27. Toposcape:

April 3. Ingo Kowarik

April 10. Jan van Schaik

April 24. Taktyk

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 lecture series is supported by the Cultural Endowment of Estonia.

www.avatudloengud.ee

SILICATE ONTOLOGY I. A material and social history 1900-2025
EKA Gallery 11.–27.04.2025
Opening: 11.04.2025 at 6pm
Open Tue–Sat 12–6 pm Sun 12–4 pm, free entry

Silicate embodies the evolution of 20th-century Estonian architecture. Among the few widely available materials during Soviet deficits, silicate played a crucial role in shaping both monumental and everyday architecture – from the heyday of functionalist villas to self-built garages, from standardised apartment buildings to military infrastructure.

Through a kaleidoscopic lens, the exhibition marries perspectives from material science, architectural history, and cultural anthropology to critically examine the contested status of silicate and its potential for future application. Interwoven throughout are the insights of alumni and research conducted by students and scholars of the Estonian Academy of Arts.

In an era of increasing resource constraints, the exhibition invites viewers to consider whether, and how, material contaminated by Soviet association can be reborn anew.

Curated by: Henri Kopra ja Iiris Tähti Toom (Spatialist Studio)
Technical support: Erik Hõim

The exhibition is supported by the Estonian Association of Architects, the Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Tallinn City, Bauroc and Sadolin Estonia.
Opening drinks from Põhjala Brewery.