Workshops

Time:
10.00–16.00, lunch 13.00–14.00 at the Kumu Café

Location:
Kumu Art Museum (Weizenbergi 34 / Valge 1)
Workshop takes place at the educational centre and also includes visits to the exhibition halls, at 10.00 we will meet up at the ticket counter (1st floor)

Workshop convenors:
Dr. Anu Allas (Kumu Art Museum) and Dr. Linda Kaljundi (Tallinn University)

Concept:
This workshop explores the relations between nature and nationalism, arts and environmentalism in the late Soviet Eastern bloc. Since the 1970s, nature was increasingly widely addressed in Eastern European visual and performative art, fictive and popular writing, film, etc. In parallel, environmental campaigns became active in the region. Due to their engagement in political activism leading to the collapse of the Eastern bloc, all these various expressions of environmentalism have usually been interpreted in the national framework.

The workshop calls to re-analyse and re-conceptualise the late Soviet representations of environment and nature in a broader than merely national context, comparing them with the global, transnational developments in environmentalism and changes in different artistic fields. The workshop will consist of presentations, discussions analysing particular case studies, and an excursion.

In particular, we would like to highlight the following questions:
– How did the concern for nature and concern for the nation (state) relate to each other? Were the various forms of environmentalism just a reframed strategy aimed to fight for political sovereignty, as it has been suggested before?
– To which extent do these works and practices reflect the developments characteristic to the late Soviet societies and to which extent to the more global criticism of modernisation and environmental discourse?
– Often, cultural representations of environmental topics included the co-operation between various artistic fields and media, and also collaboration with scholars working in human and hard sciences, as well as environmental activists. How to conceptualize these interdisciplinary networks and artefacts? And how to distinguish between their national and transnational aspirations?

Readings:
Maja and Reuben Fowkes, Cracks in the Planet: Geo-ecological Matter in East European Art. – Igor Zabel Award Publication (Ljubljana: Igor Zabel Association, 2016 [forthcoming in December])
Maja and Reuben Fowkes, The Primeval Cosmic River and its Ecological Realities: On the curatorial project Danube River School (2013–2015). – Geohumanities 2:2 (2016), 1–16.
Andres Kurg, Noise Environment: Jüri Okas’s Reconstructions and Its Public Reception. – Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi = Studies on art and architecture = Studien für Kunstwissenschaft 21 (2012), 134−175.

Jaak Kangilaski, Three Paradigms of Estonian Art during the Soviet Occupation. – Proceedings of the Art Museum of Estonia 4 (2009), special issue: Different Modernisms, Different Avant-Gardes: Problems in Central and Eastern European Art after World War II, ed. Sirje Helme, pp. 118-122.

Time:
10.00–16.00, lunch 13.00–14.00 at the Tallinn Zoo cafe

Location:
Tallinn Zoological Garden (Ehitajate tee 150 / Paldiski mnt. 145)

Workshop convenor:
Dr. Timo Maran (University of Tartu)

Concept:
Institutional goals of most contemporary zoological gardens lie in scientific work and species protection as well as recreation and environmental education. Visitor awareness about the animals depends on zoos’ effectiveness in communicating their aims and visitor’s attentiveness towards provided information. Here meaningful connections between humans and animals gain a central role: how humans perceive animals, how they engage in communication, what meanings are attributed to animals, what effects humans have on animals and how zoo experience is connected to scientific knowledge and behaviour supportive of conservation efforts.

In this workshop, we will scrutinise biological and cultural aspects of the human-animal communicational encounters (discussing animal charisma, anthropomorphic modelling, umwelt overlap, etc.). We will consider the role of charismatic animals in the economics of zoos, and will explore how the need for encounters with charismatic animals configures the practices and ethics of zoos. We further introduce semiotically informed methods for studying human-animal relations in zoos. The discussion will generalise zoo experience to broader topics of the role and meanings of animals in contemporary society. The workshop includes three lectures, short training for fieldwork, observational fieldwork (from the first and third person’s perspective) in Tallinn Zoological Gardens and concluding discussion on human-animal relations.

Morning talks:
Dr. Jamie Lorimer (University of Oxford): Nonhuman charisma and its relevance to zoos and conservation
Dr. Timo Maran (University of Tartu): Umwelts, affordances and communication in zoological gardens
MA Nelly Mäekivi (University of Tartu): Zoological garden from the semiotician’s viewpoint: suggestions for fieldwork

After lunch:
Group fieldwork in Tallinn Zoological Garden (participants will be paired up and guidelines for conducting fieldwork will be provided)
General discussion based on fieldwork results

Readings:
Falk, John et al. (2007). Why Zoos and Aquariums Matter: Assessing the Impact of a Visit to a Zoo or Aquarium. Silver Spring: Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Available at: http://aza.dev.networkats.com/uploadedFiles/Education/why_zoos_matter.pdf
Hediger, Heini (1969). What does man mean to the animal? Man and Animal in the Zoo. New York: A Seymour Lawrence Book. Pp. 75–95 (Chap. 4 ).
Lindahl-Elliot, Nils (2006). See it, sense it, save it: economies of multisensuality in contemporary zoos. The Senses and Society 2 (1): 203–224.
Lorimer, Jamie (2007). Nonhuman charisma. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25 (5): 911–932.
Mäekivi, Nelly; Maran, Timo (2016). Semiotic dimensions of human attitudes towards other animals: A case of zoological gardens. Sign Systems Studies 44 (1/2), 209–230.

Time:
10.00–16.00, lunch 13.00–14.00 at Von Krahli Aed (Rataskaevu 8)

Location:
Estonian Healthcare Museum (Lai tn. 30) and a city tour

Workshop convenors:
Dr. Kati Lindström (KTH Royal Institute of Technology / University of Tartu) and Prof. Gregg Mitman (University of Wisconsin – Madison / Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society)

Concept:
Breathing and eating are two non-negotiable needs that put our bodies in immediate contact with our surrounding environment. Failing to breathe or eat, we die. Thus, representations, realities and regulations of breathing, eating and dying also constitute a prime stage for analysing human-environment relations. Ideas of what is a good and healthy environment, what should be eaten, how we should breath and what it means to be sick and pass away, reflect a culture’s way to relate to its natural environment. At the same time, these are heavily regulated and culturally controlled areas of a society that needed to be constantly re-conceptualised. Images of languished fainting ladies in decadent art, young noblewomen and artists that die from tuberculosis in La Boheme, La Traviata or Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain are just some expressions of or cultural engagement with the topics of health, sickness and death. Romantic biographies count dramatic stories of noble artists’ illness and death by tuberculosis, but even more numerous are stories we never hear: unromantic, painful ailments of the poor, the minorities, the outcasts. On the other hand, these conceptualizations of disease are also materialized in city plans, buildings, products and infrastructure, and are imposed on people’s bodies through food, treatment and movement. We will discuss the social construction of ailment and health, what role is environment supposed to play in disease and treatment, and how have these changing ideas influenced material culture and practices. The workshop is built around analytic sessions with different types of source materials and a field visit, with an aim to encourage young researchers to engage with different sources and methods of environmental humanities, from art works and literature to life histories, historical sources and material culture. The workshop includes sampling of “healthy” food.

Schedule:
The morning session consists of an overall theoretical introduction from Gregg Mitman, an introductory session on the sources of environmental humanities, and work in groups with selected source materials. Materials are provided by the convenors of the workshop with a view that all participants can apply their own disciplinary analytic methods in interdisciplinary context. The afternoon session starts with a city tour, analysing how do ideas on breathing and disease materialise in built environment, and ends with an overall discussion, connecting the group discussions and source materials back to the wider context of environmental humanities.

The length of the city tour depends on the weather conditions but please keep in mind that it is January, so it can be cold that we may have to walk on uneven slippery surfaces.

Readings:

Obligatory reading:

Sheila Rothman (1994). Chapter 9  from her Living in the Shadow of Death: Tuberculosis and the Social Experience of Illness in American History (New York: Basic Books).

Time:
10.00–16.00, lunch 13.00–14.00 at Von Krahl Bar (Rataskaevu 10)

Location:
Faculty of Art and Culture, Estonian Academy of Arts (Suur-Kloostri 11)

Workshop convenors:
Prof. Maros Krivy (Estonian Academy of Arts / Cambridge University) and Agata Marzecova (Tallinn University)

Concept:
The idea that nature is an antidote to urbanization is as long as the latter process itself. The history of returns to nature closely mirrors the history of the modern city. The urban-nature binarism played a central role in such diverse contexts as the German Lebensreform-movement, the English garden city reform program, and the Estonian Phosporite war. Yet while nature endures as a medicine to be prescribed against the apparent evils of urbanization, we must see it as a pharmakon, the application of which instantiates new problems that require treatment in their own right. In the workshop we will discuss contemporary ideologies of the return to nature. Workshop will zoom in on two themes: the aesthetics of wastelands and the design idea of biomimetics. Focusing on architecture, urban design and urban discourse more generally, we will question the “solutionist” register in which these themes are invariably practised and advocated. Wastelands, as the term makes clear, are spaces with stigma. Yet, in the last decades, wastelands have become central to the symbolic production of value, and to the monetary realization of their apparent “potential”. The aesthetics of man-made objects overtaken by ruderal plants, moss, and rust, and the “apocalyptic pastoral” makeshift design of innumerable cultural factories, have concurred with municipal entrepreneurialism, speculative real estate development and gentrification.

The aesthetic centrality of wastelands to post-Fordism concurs with the notion of spontaneous emergence that manifests in the process of nature overtaking culture. It coincides with the neo-vitalist, biomimetic impulses in architecture and urbanism. Biourbanism is a name of a recently popularised design program, for which nature is a teacher and a guide. Yet such program heralds also a dubious return to organicist and holistic philosophies, in which urban democracy and planning are replaced by spiritual stimulation, ad-hoc interventions and algorithmic monitoring. The workshop combines several formats. The outline of the problematic is introduced in the lecture. In the seminar we will discuss the assigned readings. During the fieldwork students will test theidea and search for their evidence outside of the classroom. The workshop outcome will be a physical object, into which theoretical discussion and fieldwork will converge.

Readings:
Smith, Neil (1991). Uneven Development. Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell), 1–16 (chapter 1).
Gandy, Matthew (2015). From urban ecology to ecological urbanism: an ambiguous trajectory. Area 47 (2): 150–154.
Gissen, David (2015). Nature’s historical crises. Journal of Architectural Education 69 (1): 5–7.
Ross Adams (2010), Longing for a greener present: Neoliberalism and the eco-city. Radical Philosophy 163: 1–7.
Spencer, Douglas (2014). Nature is the dummy: Circulations of the metabolic. – D. Ibañez, N. Katsikis (eds.), New Geographies 6: Grounding Metabolism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 108–113.
Goldstein, Jesse;Johnson, Elizabeth (2015). Biomimicry: New natures, new enclosures. Theory, Culture & Society 32 (1): 61–81.

Time:
10.00–16.00, lunch 12.45–13.30 at Reval Café (Telliskivi 60a)

Location:
Seminar Room „Sõna“, A3 building, Loomelinnak/Creative City, A3 Building, 4th floor (Telliskivi 60a)

Workshop convenors:
Prof. Patrick Laviolette (Tallinn University) and Dr. Tarmo Pikner (Tallinn University)

Concept:
Cities are hot-spots of accelerated consumption, simultaneously acting as localities where novel lifestyles and values emerge as well as bringing sustainability and recycling into focus. This workshop shall point attention to particular actors and environments as thresholds that influence wider sensitivities and creativities related to the recycling of matter. Tallinn is a fine exemplar for discussing and learning about these issues since it encompasses a fascinating post-socialist set of urban transformations. Hence, we plan to visit a few sites conceptually and literally related to the concept of recycling* as well as have some thematic presentations by encouraging participants to develop a collaborative photo-essay on the topic.

* Sites such as: wasteland(s), a regenerated post-industrial quarter, a handicraft workshop, a former ‘detention’ centre.

Schedule:
10.00–10.40: Introduction, theoretical aspects and thematic examples: Patrick Laviolette & Tarmo Pikner
10.40–11.15: Discussion of the reading materials
11.15–12.00: Teele Pehk (Linnalabor/Urban Lab): Open the city‘s waterfront and post-industrial sites: example of “Beta-promenade” in Tallinn
12.00–12.45: What happens with Telliskivi quarter and its post-industrial character? (a guided walk)
12.45–13.30: Lunch
13.30–15.00: Walk and site encounters related to the workshop issues in northern Tallinn; guided by Oliver Orro (Estonian Academy of Arts) and Tarmo Pikner
15.00–16.00: (with coffee) A short group-work and discussion of preliminary findings

Readings:
Laviolette, P. (2014). The neo-flâneur amongst irresistible decay. In Martinez, F. & K. Slabina (eds). Playgrounds and Battlefields (Tallinn: TLÜ Press), 243−270.
Martinez, F. & P. Laviolette (2016). Trespass into the liminal. Anthropological Journal of European Cultures, 25 (2): (24 pages, in press).
Pikner, T. (2014). Enactments of urban nature: Considering the industrial ruins. Geografiska Annaler Series B-Human Geography 96 (1): 83−94.
Pikner, T. (2016). Lines of movement connecting Tallinn’s old harbor and the city. Dérive 63: 31−36.

Rendell, J. (1999). Thresholds, passages and surfaces: Touching, passing and seeing in the Burlington Arcade. In Cole, A. (ed). The Optics of Walter Benjamin (London: Blackdog Publishing).
Rendell, J. (2001). “Bazaar beauties” or “pleasure is our pursuit”: A spatial story of exchange. In Borden, I. et al. (eds). The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space (London: MIT Press), 115–130.

Time:
10.00–16.00, lunch 12.00–13.00 at MuSu restaurant, Rahumäe (Pärnu maantee 209a)

Location:
Rahumäe cemetery (Rahumäe tee 8) and Under and Tuglas Literature Centre’s museum department (Väikese Illimari 11)

Workshop convenors:
Kadri Tüür (Tallinn University / University of Tartu) and Prof. Kate Soper ( London Metropolitan University)

Concept:
Art, including literary creation, generally relies on carefully selected, elaborated and sequenced representations of, or responses to, the surrounding reality. Ecocriticism is a field of investigation within the environmental humanities that is concerned with the ways in which literary texts (and other kinds of cultural media e.g. auditory and visual) invite us to reflect on relationships of humans with other living beings and the environment, whether largely natural (e.g. an old-growth forest) or largely humanly constructed (e.g. cities). From a biosemiotic viewpoint, literary texts as communicative vehicles are analogous to the natural environment. Human representations of these perceived activities create for us partial access to the Umwelten of other species, and a possibility for further, extra-textual communication is opened up. Biosemiotic criticism studies the mechanisms employed in our representations of nature for modelling the meaningful connections between organisms and their environment, as well as the nonverbal communicative processes in which humans too are perpetually engaged (generally below the level of consciousness). The central notions that we are going to explore during the workshop, include Umwelt – the species’-specific ways of perceiving the world, as well as ways of influencing one’s surroundings; multi-species environments – where different species live together, having an agency to impact each other and to shape the environment; ecopoetics – a practice for bringing new life into being, interweaving diverse materials and reiterating the connective, communicative processes that form ecosystems.

The questions that we set to explore during the workshop are:
– How much information are we able to gain from the natural environment on our own? But how much, if we are supervised? What are the features and aspects of natural environment that we consider culturally valuable? May nature elicit awkward feelings? Which and why?
– What are the cultural filters that we use in relating to our fellow creatures, be these other animals or plants? What is the use of cultural categorisation? What ethical implications does our perception have?
– What are the possible ways of representing nature, using specifically human means – such as language, painting, recording technology? What exactly makes the difference when we compare the finalised representations? What skills does it take to represent nature? Are we able to communicate our representations across cultural borders or back to our „target species“? On what conditions, and why?

Schedule:
At 10.00, we will meet up at Baltic Station and take a train to Rahumäe from there. The first 1,5 hours of the workshop are dedicated to exploring the multi-sensory and multi-species’ aspects of Rahumäe cemetery: the tree species and forms; birds and small mammals inhabiting the area; sounds, senses; the cultural history that lies behind this particular semi-urban, semi-natural environment. Please wear solid boots to prevent your feet from getting damp. You might want to take your binoculars for bird watching with you (but not obligatory).
At 13.00, after lunch, we walk to Under and Tuglas Literature Centre’s museum department where we have a seminar for discussing the reading assignments and their connections with our firsthand experiences of nature. Then after getting acquainted with some samples of local traditional nature representations in the form of sound recordings (by Fred Jüssi), nature writing (by Johannes Piiper), and poetry (by Marie Under), each participant will have some time until 16.00 to produce their own text, music, sound, or a representation in any other predominantly non-visual media as the conclusion to the workshop day. The trains back to the city run approximately every 20 min.

Readings:
Kull, Kalevi (1998). Semiotic ecology: different natures in the semiosphere. Sign Systems Studies 26: 344–371. Available at: http://www.zbi.ee/~kalevi/ecosem.htm
Rigby, Kate (in press). Deep sustainability: ecopoetics, enjoyment and ecstatic hospitality. – Literature and Sustainability: Exploratory Essays. Eds Louise Squire, John Parham and Adeline Johns-Putra (Manchester University Press).

The workshop is organised in co-operation with Under and Tuglas Literature Centre (Elle-Mari Talivee) and Tallinn Bird Club.