Erika Henriksson: Making-with - lecture at Gallery VI PER

The current environmental crisis is a state that carries testimony to dysfunctional and damaged relationships – both among people and between people and their surrounding world. But "the world is not over yet," as feminist theorist Donna J. Haraway reminds her readers. She suggests that the challenge ahead of us is to learn how to function together: to become ourselves together, to think and create together, which can bring unexpected forms of cooperation and combinations of this cooperation. All of this aims to limit the urgency of this time as much as possible.
In her lecture titled Making-with, Erika Henriksson will discuss how she creates her large-scale spatial installations and how she applies the principles of openness and improvisation in the process. By relinquishing control and conventional architectural methods, she creates building projects that are not pre-planned but unfold depending on the circumstances of the environment in which she works. Her work develops through her personal engagement in the local economy, as well as through the exploration of low-impact building techniques and the relational processes of creation involving both human and material factors. This approach also represents an examination of the conditions for constructing alternative pathways away from the dominant and hegemonic forces of efficiency, categorization, and economic value. During her presentation, she will also discuss how the ethics of care and relational thinking has shaped her practice and will present some of her site-specific building projects.
Erika Henriksson is a practicing architect and researcher who operates at the intersection of architecture, craft, and art. In her variable architectural work, influenced by feminist ethics and values, she works in a performative and explorative manner, stemming from a personal and intimate relationship with people, environments, and materials. She is currently completing her practice-based doctoral dissertation titled "Performing Architherapy: About Crafting a Building Practice for Caring Relations" and is working on a site-specific spatial installation at Kunstarena in the Rena forest in Norway.
The event is part of our program this year within the Future Architecture Platform.