The current environmental crisis is a condition that bear with it a testimony of dysfunctional and damaged relations between human beings and human beings and their surrounding world. But ‘the world is not yet over’, multispecies feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway has reminded her readers. She suggests that the challenge ahead is to learn to become-with, think-with and make-with each other, in unexpected collaborations and combinations, in order to make this urgent time as thin as possible.

In the presentation Erika Henriksson will talk about her process of making with openness and improvisation when forming large-scale spatial installations. By letting go of control and conventional architectural methods, she develops building projects that are not planned out beforehand, but which unfolds in relation to the circumstances of the environment where she is working. Through personal engagements with the local economy of her surrounding, explorations in low-impact building techniques, human and material relational processes of making her work evolves; an approach that at the same time is an exploration in conditions of constructing alternative paths away from dominant and hegemonic forces of efficiency, categorization and economic value. During the presentation she will discuss how an ethos of care and relational thinking has shaped her practice and go through some of her site-specific building projects.

Erika Henriksson is an architect and practice-based researcher working in an intersection between architecture, craft and art. Through an altering practice of architecture, influenced by feminist ethics and values, she work in performative and exploratory manners that emanate from personal and intimate relations to people, environments and materials. At the moment she is finalizing her practice based PhD thesis, ‘Performing Architherapy: About Crafting a Building Practice for Caring Relations’ and working on a site-specific spatial installation at Kunstarena, in the forest of Rena, Norway.

Photo: Adrian Bugge

This event is part of VI PER's 2021 Future Architecture Platform programme, which Erika was selected to with her project Architherapy.

Entre Room 11

Entre Architherapy