Application deadline: April 8, 2025
“You got to make your own world, you got to write yourself in.”
―Octavia Butler (2000)
Reconstructions is a further education course at Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm. It seeks to reimagine spatial practices “otherwise”—learning from black feminism. The course is experimental, interdisciplinary and practice-based at advanced level, bringing together an intimate group of practitioners and researchers to be in dialogue and engagement with each other alongside invited guests. It is led by Marie-Louise Richards, Lecturer in Architecture, and is part of the Department for Research and Further Education in Architecture and Fine Art at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.
What might it mean to imagine spatial practices that center the emotional and affective labor required to refuse the world as we know it? The course asks what kind of reparative world-building practice could emerge if careful attention was paid to the bodily, affective work, and the physical and mental cost that are demanded in undermining colonial scripts.
Sensing and attuning to social vulnerabilities—their complexities, intersections and unequal distribution—allows for respect, value, and credit to the affective labor and care that is required to reimagine future practices. This involves not only imagining other modes and forms of spatial practice, but also reflectively recovering and foregrounding modes and forms of thinking, being, and doing that have been erased, forgotten, ignored, and devalued.
The methods that will be employed are relational; embodied and poetic, and will include experimental approaches that centers emotional and affective labor, forms of sharing knowledges and care, both in terms of envisioning future practice as well as future ways of living through a variety of mediums and expressions. These include introducing feminist methodologies and approaches rooted in black radical feminist thought, black study, cyberfeminism, science-fiction, afrofuturism, critical spatial practices—as well as a series of related art, architectural practices and research.
The course is one-year and full-time. The cohort gathers monthly for five-day intensive sessions with lectures, seminars, workshops, case studies, and visits. In dialogue with guests and collaborators, the sessions aim to facilitate a series of semi-public spaces, settings, programs, and activities that centers and rethinks affect, labor, knowledge and care both in terms of envisioning future practice as well as future ways of living.
Between fall 2023–spring 2025 the course have hosted, and been hosted by: Camille Sapara Barton, Tina Campt, Asta Diawara, Mariam Elnozahy, Ulrika Flink, Samuel Grima, Cecilia Germain, Saidiya Hartman, Joshua Idehen, Sofia Jernberg, Aspar Karahyuseinov, Bea Macintosh, Eric Magassa, Gabriela De Matos, Ayesha Quraishi, Burcu Sahin, Sara Solomon Utberg, Françoise Vergès, Lisa Tan, Yemisi Wilson, Carla Zaccagnini.
Previous and current collaborators include: re:arc institute, Black Archives Sweden, Konsthall C, Moderna Museet, Tensta konsthall, IASPIS, Index—The Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation, Stockholm University of the Arts, Stockholm University, Malmö Konsthall, Hägerstensåsens Medborgarhus, Institute for Futures Studies.
For more information on how to apply visit the course page at the Royal Institute of Art website. News will also be updated through the Institute’s social channels.
