Relocating a Swedish City: Kiruna Forever
*This event will be occurring as a live webinar. Registrants will be emailed a link to access the program.*
“Kiruna – a city in the northernmost part of Sweden – is experiencing one of the biggest urban transformation projects in recent history. The city is being relocated by three kilometers due to the expansion of the mine around which Kiruna was built. A third of the population must relocate, housing blocks and landmark buildings are being demolished or moved, and a new city is taking shape. But how do you move a city?” – Kiruna Forever, ArkDes, Sweden
Kiruna Forever, an extensive exhibition taking place at ArkDes, Sweden’s National Centre for Architecture and Design, examines the ongoing relocation of Kiruna. This webinar will feature presentations by Carlos Mínguez Carrasco, Curator of Kiruna Forever, and Elisa María López, an doctoral candidate at Uppsala Uiversitet, whose research explores how space, nature, and difference is produced and negotiated in the Swedish Ore Fields, particularly in the context of mining-based displacement and resettlement. This webinar will focus on the unique story of Kiruna as well as broader topics of placemaking, community engagement, mass relocation, and relations wtih indigenous peoples. As climate change and human intervention increasingly mandate the relocation of populations, Kiruna can provide invaluable lessons for architects, designers, and urbanists everywhere.
A moderated discussion will be led by Gideon Fink Shapiro, a New York-based historian and theorist of architecture, urbanism, and landscape, whose recent essay “Kiruna, Forever Changing” was featured in Places Journal.
Speakers:
Gideon Fink Shapiro, Ph.D., Historian, Theorist, Critic
Elisa M. López, Doctoral Candidate, Uppsala Universitet; Former Fulbright Fellow, Sweden
Carlos Mínguez Carrasco, Head Curator, ArkDes
About the Speakers:
Gideon Fink Shapiro is a New York-based historian and theorist of architecture, urbanism, and landscape. His writings on the built environment have appeared in journals and magazines including Architect, Domus, LA+, Next City, and The Avery Review. His forthcoming book from the University of Pennsylvania Press analyzes Adolphe Alphand and the landscape architecture of public parks in 19th century Paris. He is also working with Aaron Betsky on Breaking the Box, a book of “design lessons” based on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. Previously he co-authored The New Residential Colleges at Yale: A Conversation Across Time with Robert A.M. Stern, and edited Re-Living the City, a catalog of the Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture. In 2019 he curated the exhibition “Big Ideas for Small Lots” at the Center for Architecture in New York City.
Elisa M. López is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Anthropology at Uppsala Universitet, Sweden. She holds a Master’s Degree in Sociocultural Anthropology from Columbia University and was a 2011-2012 Fulbright Fellow to Sweden. Her forthcoming Ph.D. dissertation is based thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Kiruna between 2012 and 2015, and examines the social production of space in the Swedish Ore Fields, both as an Indigenous homeland and as a territory of extraction. She served as a curatorial consultant for the Kiruna Forever exhibition at ArkDes, focusing on media representations of the city move, and wrote an essay for the catalog on the same theme.
Carlos Mínguez Carrasco is an architect and curator based in Stockholm. He is the Head Curator at ArkDes, the Swedish National Centre for Architecture and Design. Between 2012 and 2017 he was Associate Curator at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York. He organized the 2016 Oslo Architecture Triennale with the After Belonging Agency and was Assistant Curator of OfficeUS, the U.S. Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale. His texts have been published in different publications and journals such as Domus, Migrant, and Código and he is editor of various publications, including After Belonging (Lars Müller Publishers, 2016), OfficeUS Manual (Lars Müller Publishers, 2017) Bodybuilding: Architecture and Performance (Performa, 2019), and Kiruna Forever (ArkDes and Arkitektur Förlag, 2020). He has taught at Columbia University GSAPP and lectured in different universities and cultural centers in Europe, Latin America, and the United States.
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