DAAS, KKH – Residency | May 2021
ST(R)AY
collective encounters
As a continuation of the conversations initiated in the autumn of 2020 within the frame of Decolonising Architecture Advanced Studies (DAAS), St(r)ay is an invitation to a series of encounters sheltered in wandering places, among which: GROUND – Stockholm, KKH residency – Berlin, Casa Punto Croce – Venice.
Our wish is to maintain the broadness of the individual research interests and methods of expressions, since our established collaboration originates specifically in learning from and inspiring each other’s research. Collectively, we present a series of installations, project pitches, gatherings, and conversations that introduce nuanced perspectives on decoloniality and demodernization in relation to architecture.
We have embraced the multi-directionality of our happenings, welcoming the contaminations of our encounters, as unintentional, spontaneous forms of polyrhythmic ensembles, in harmony and dissonance (Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World, 2015) through the pluriversity of our trajectories and intersections.
St(r)ay are collective encounters initiated by::
Silvia Susanna is an architect and independent researcher based in Rome. Her interests are in critical spatial practices, community-driven projects, speculative design research and storytelling. Her focus is primarily on projects that are questioning or reflecting established assumptions of the built environment and its relative social, cultural and political implications.
Steffie de Gaetano is a Dutch-Italian interdisciplinary researcher currently based in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Her condition of ‘inbetweenness’ predisposes her positioning as an outside-insider, a standpoint she utilizes for bridging the modern with the demodern. Her work is situated at the intersection of architecture, landscape, art, and anthropology, disciplines she critically unbuilds by uncovering the colonial entanglements and the ramifications of Modernity in the environment through the traces left by material flows, organic matter, and beyond-human indices.
Alice Pontiggia is an architect and independent artist-researcher from Valtellina, Italy. Her current project The Act of Recosmizing is supported by the Decolonizing Architecture Advanced Studies community at the Royal Institute of Art Stockholm, and explores the relationships co-defining human communities and their environment in lower Valtellina. She works in between architecture, art and philosophy, and presents her research in international contexts through writing, architecture, film, body-based practices and sound.
Linnea Fröjd is an urban planner and landscape architect based in Stockholm, Sweden. She has an interest in the political aspects of planning and architecture and how these affect the social inequality of the city. Her work explores the relationship between language and power and its connection to contemporary norms and ideals within architecture. Her current research is about housing politics and the role of the planner therein.
Mikaela Karlsson is an urban planner from the US currently based in Sweden, who oscillates between Stockholm, Malmö, Boston, and Providence. She pursued degrees in urban studies and sustainable urban planning and design under the guise of the city as a locus for social change and the urban planner as the changemaker, but she is somewhat skeptical and often turns to collective and community practice instead. An anarchist politician and foreign Swede, Mikaela finds confusion, comfort and fun in contradiction and performativity, and uses queerness as a point of departure in her work.