BIOS
Sara Brolund de Carvalho is an artist, architect, and lecturer at KTH School of Architecture. Her practice is situated in the borderland between architecture/urban planning and art. She has previously worked with film and as a project manager for initiatives for young people within the field of urban planning. She has written about citizen participation in urban planning, feminist architecture, collective housing, common spaces/rooms and other themes that usually touch on concepts such as spatial care and community building. She is the co-editor, with Meike Schalk and Beatrice Stüde, of the publication Caring for Communities (Stockholm: Action Archive Publishing, 2019). She is currently working on a project, with Gunilla Lundahl and Per Hasselberg, on children’s play/role in the city, in Sweden (partly funded by ARQ Foundation/White).
Maryam Fanni is a graphic designer and PhD student in Design at the HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg. She runs her own design studio focusing on printed matter and book design for cultural and non-profit clients, alongside research-based artistic practices and writing. She is a co-founder of collectives Söderorts Institut För Andra Visioner working on rights to the city issues (2013–2017), MMS, a collective of graphic designers working on womens and laborers design history-writing (2012–), and Mapping the Unjust City, counter-mapping ownership in the built environment (2015–). She is a co-editor of Natural Enemies of Books – A Messy History of Women in Printing and Typography (Occasional Papers, 2020) that is being translated to three languages (Portuguese, Finnish, Italian).
Heidi Svenningsen Kajita is an architect, assistant professor at University of Copenhagen and currently Visiting Fellow at Newcastle University funded by Independent Research Fund Denmark. Drawing on emerging ethnographic-architectural methodology, her practice-based research concerns relationships between architects’ practices and processes; building norms; and lived experiences. She has taught extensively in schools of architecture, design and art – specialising in didactics for situated and collaborative praxis. Heidi is co-founder of Bureaus – a platform for spatial design, research and strategies. From these different roles, she has more than 15 years of experience in dealing with democratic processes in the architecture and planning of post WW2 large-scale housing estates. She has published/ exhibited internationally in journals, books and exhibitions such as: Mass Housing of the Scandinavian Welfare States: Past Present and Future Perspectives (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), Forming Welfare (The Danish Architectural Press, 2017), and Sketching, drawing, scripting, modeling: Artifacts of designing and their knowledge practices (Netzwerk Architekturwissenschaft, (2017/2020). Heidi is a member of the Society of Artists (Kunstnersamfundet)
Jennifer Mack is Associate Professor and Docent at KTH Stockholm and a Pro Futura Scientia Fellow of the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study. Broadly, Mack’s work links architectural history and anthropology to investigate questions of equality, power, and ecology in the built environment. Her current research focuses on the housing and landscapes of late modernist suburbs, drawing on cases in Sweden and Denmark. Mack’s monograph, The Construction of Equality: Syriac Immigration and the Swedish City (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), received the Margaret Mead Award from SfAA/AAA in 2018. She has co-edited the anthologies Rethinking the Social in Architecture (Actar, 2019) and Life Among Urban Planners (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020) and is a member of the editorial boards of Thresholds and Human Organization.
Helena Mattsson is Professor in History and Theory at KTH School of Architecture. Her research deals with the 20th century theory on welfare state architecture and contemporary architectural history with a special focus on the interdependency between politics, economy and spatial organizations. Most recently Mattsson published the monograph Architecture and Retrenchment: Neoliberalization of the Swedish Model Across Aesthetics and Space, 1968-1994 (London: Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2023).She is the co-editor for publications such as Swedish Modernism: Architecture, Consumption, and the Welfare State (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2010), the themed issue of Architecture and Culture, “Architecture and Capitalism: Solids and Flows,“ 2017 and Neoliberalism on the Ground: Architecture and Transformation from the 1960s to the Present (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2020). Mattsson is a member of the editorial board of Journal of Architecture.
Svava Riesto is associate professor at the University of Copenhagen, where she leads the Research Group for Landscape Architecture and Urban History. Her work intersects architectural history and heritage studies to address questions of justice, ecology, climate and social change in cities and landscapes. Svava co-curated Women in Architecture (Danish Architecture Center 2022) and European Social Housing as Living Heritage (pushousing.eu 2019-2021). Her books include Biography of an Industrial Landscape. Carlsberg’s Urban Spaces Retold (2017), and Untold Stories. On women, gender and architecture in Denmark (2023, w/Jannie R. Bendsen and Henriette Steiner), ByWomen. A guidebook to everyday architecture in Greater Copenhagen (2022, w/Liv L. Rahbek and Henriette Steiner) and the co-edited Vademecum: 77 Minor Terms for Writing Urban Places (2021, w/Klaske Havik, Kris Pint and Henriette Steiner).
Meike Schalk is an architect and Associate Professor in Urban Design and Urban Theory at KTH School of Architecture. Her research inquires discourses of sustainability and democracy in urban planning through practice-based research methods, feminist and intersectionality studies. Schalk has examined historical and contemporary shifts of welfare spaces and policies in housing in Sweden and Vienna. Recent publications include Feminist Futures of Spatial Practice: Materialisms, Activisms, Dialogues, Pedagogies, Projections, co-edited with Thérèse Kristiansson and Ramia Mazé, 2017; Architecture and Culture, Vol.5 (3), Styles of Queer Feminist Practices and Objects in Architecture, 2017; and Field #7, Becoming a Feminist Architect, 2017, both co-edited with Karin Reisinger.
EXHIBITIONS AND PUBLIC EVENTS:
15 October 2022, Folkets Husby, Stockholm
Seminar: “Solidarity in times of repressive politics – a seminar on the effects of the concepts ‘especially/vulnerable areas’”
Panel: Marlen Eskander, Beata Hemer, Ilhan Kellecioglu, Marie Northroup, Nazem Tahvilzadeh.
Moderated by: Maryam Fanni.
15 October 2021, CAFX Copenhagen Architecture Festival at Lundtoftegade, Copenhagen
Witness seminar: “Caring for plans Narratives of the Parallel Society Package” on how the current national laws on ‘parallel societies’ and ‘challenged urban areas’ in Denmark affect local communities on the ground.
Moderated by: Heidi Svenningsen Kajita and Svava Riesto.
22 May-11 September , 2022, Flanders Architecture Institute, Antwerpen
26 March-29 August, 2021, Zentrum Architektur Zürich, Zürich
28 January-30 April, 2021, Voralberger Architekturinstitut, Dornbirn
9 June-13 September, 2020, Technische Sammlungen Dresden, Dresden
2 February-3 March, 2020, Deutsches Architekturzentrum, DAZ, Berlin
25 April-9 September, 2019, AzW Architekturzentrum Wien, Vienna
Caring for Communities, group show Architecture and Urbanism for a Broken Planet.
Meike Schalk, Sara Brolund de Carvalho and Beatrice Stüde.
Curators: Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny.
30 November 2019, Iaspis, Stockholm
“Aktion Arkiv: Women in Architecture 1960–2015”, a public writing workshop to contribute with text material to an upcoming encyclopedia (Bloomsbury Publishing).
8 September 2019, Nordbahnhof, Vienna
“Caring for Communities”, a Forum Theater play dealing with common rooms as a conflict area between bureaucracy and community. Action Archive in collaboration with Arkitekturzentrum Wien.
12 April 2019, ArkDes, Stockholm
Witness seminar with the group BiG (Bo i Gemenskap)
Participants: Ingela Blomberg, Kerstin Kärnekull, Gunilla Lundahl, Ann Norrby, Inga-Lisa Sangregorio and Sonja Vidén.
Moderators: Sara Brolund de Carvalho and Helena Mattsson.
26 September 2018-13 January 2019, Public Luxury, ArkDes, Stockholm
Group show 'Tensta Museum: Reports from New Sweden'
Sara Brolund de Carvalho, Helena Mattsson, Meike Schalk.
Curator: Maria Lind / Kieran Long.
29 November 2018, ArkDes, Stockholm
“För vems kropp skapas staden?” Workshop about intersectionality in urban planning.
Action Archive in collab. Karin Forss, Tove Samzelius, Shimeng Zhou and Jennie Argerich.
2017, Vienna Biennale, Nordbahn-Halle, Vienna
Caring for Communities. Action Archive in Vienna, group show Care + Repair, A public workspace of the Architekturzentrum Wien in the framework of the Vienna Biennale 2017.
Meike Schalk, Sara Brolund de Carvalho, Beatrice Stüde.
Curators: Angelika Fitz and Elke Krasny.
17-19 November 2016, KTH School of Architecture, Stockholm
Action Archive, group show Suzanne Lacy’s International Dinner Party in feminist curatorial throught, as part of the AHRA conference Architecture and Feminisms: Ecologies, Economies, Technologies.
Sara Brolund de Carvalho, Helena Mattsson, Meike Schalk.
Curator: Elke Krasny
2015, Gallery Toni-Areal, ZHdK Zürich
Action Archive: The witness seminar, group show Suzanne Lacy’s International Dinner Party in feminist curatorial throught.
Sara Brolund de Carvalho, Helena Mattsson, Meike Schalk.
Curator: Elke Krasny
26 October 2013–18 May 2014, Tensta konsthall, Stockholm
”Action Archive in Tensta”, group show, Tensta Museum. Reports from New Sweden
Co-authors: Meike Schalk, Helena Mattsson, Sara Brolund de Carvalho.
Curator: Maria Lind
2014
Three Actions by Action Archive: Witness seminar at Tensta konsthall (March 5), Guided tour and there-enactment of a 1992 dinner party at “Familjebo” Glömmingegränd (April 27), Kampen om rummetseminar, ABF-huset (May 8), 2014. Supported by Tensta konsthall, Stockholm Stad, KTH, Institute of ContemporaryHistory Södertörn University.