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Charis Nika

Charis Nika is an architect and researcher with an interest in the social, political and experiential aspects of architecture and urbanism. She is currently working on her PhD in the Department of Architecture at the University of Cyprus. Her research explores practices through which one can know and imagine the city and how such practices relate to questions of justice in the urban environment. Charis has completed postgraduate studies at TU Delft and undergraduate studies at Cardiff University. She has worked in architectural practices in Rotterdam, London and Cardiff. Her independent work has been presented in a number of exhibitions, including the 17th International Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021.

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Ryan Hughes at the University of Amsterdam

I was wonderfully hosted by the University of Amsterdam, was provided with a generous space to work from and made to feel very welcome by research colleagues enabling me to participate in research group meetings and to get a real understanding for the academic and creative work being undertaken from the university.

I used a significant period of time during the secondment meeting artists, curators and funders of contemporary art across the Netherlands and have continued conversations with at least two of these artists around the possibilities of commissioning new work for exhibition in the UK.

I also visited each of the cultural partners’ venues across the Netherlands, seeing an inspiring range of exhibitions, events and public artworks as well as innovative systems designed to support artistic practice.

While visiting these spaces I was able to reflect on public infrastructure, transport, health, wellbeing and public space and observed how cycling is a pivotal feature of Dutch life. This is something that I will continue reflecting on in relation to the UK.

I have continued conversations with academics, artists, curators and funders that I met during the secondment and are planning projects, pieces of work and developing applications for activities that will take place both in the UK and in the Netherlands supporting and continuing significant international, cross-sector exchange.

Ryan Hughes

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Melanie Jackson

Royal College of Art, UK

Melanie Jackson is an artist, and a Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London. She works with modes of non-fiction storytelling through assemblages of sculpture, writing and moving image, focused on Ur-forms of resisting biotechnocapital and their resonance in the contemporary moment.

She is founder of @thepoorhousereadingrooms. Recent solo exhibitions include Spekyng Rybawdy at Block336, London and Deeper in the Pyramid, Banner Repeater, London Grand Union, Birmingham and Primary, Nottingham, with books of the same name as part of an ongoing writing collaboration with writer Esther Leslie. Other solo shows include Matts Gallery, Flat Time House, John Hansard Gallery, the Drawing Room, Chapter Arts Centre as well as group shows nationally and internationally including eva 2020/1, Ireland’s biennale.

As part of my practice, I am founder of @thepoorhousereadingrooms, an artist led archive and rural residency space for urban based artists, and a repository and occasional publisher of artists books and editions for regional publics. The reading rooms also fold in a pedagogical role working with students and learners who want to work with archives and/or making books.

For Spacex Melanie is particularly interested in these three strands:

  • Art as a Means for Investigating the Archive
  • Art as a means of constructing the Archive
  • Pedagogic Strategies and the Transformation and Construction of Subjectivity 
And will use the secondment to research models of self organisation within spacex membership, and in archives across Europe.

Secondment destination:
tbc

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Maria Loizidou

AA & U for Architecture, Art and Urbanism

Maria Loizidou (www.marialoizidou.com ) is a visual artist, who renews her work’s perspective and enriches it with social and political concerns, by emphasizing “the power of fragility”. She is one of the co-founders of AA & U for Architecture, Art and Urbanism. AA & U focuses on the constructive entanglements between architecture, urban planning and the visual arts to support the urban commons (www.aaplusu.com ). Maria’s collaboration with AA & U allows her to address practices of fragility in a collective and interdisciplinary level.

Secondment destination:
University of Applied Arts, Vienna, Austria, 2023
The University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 2024

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Socrates Stratis, Prof.

University of Cyprus

Socrates Stratis (www.socratestratis.com ) is an urbanist, architect, and activist for the urban commons. He is Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus. He is the co-founder of the critical urban practice agency AA & U, Cyprus, (www.aaplusu.com ). His research focuses on the political agencies of architecture and urban design. Socrates investigates how the strategic and tactful values of urban design, as well as the social dimensions of architecture, inform critical urban practices. He oscillates between diffractive practice and practice-led research, thanks to creative entanglements between teaching, practicing, curating, and writing. His publications include the “Guide to Common Urban Imaginaries in Contested Spaces” (Jovis 2016) and numerous articles available here. His curatorial and activist work includes the Cyprus participation in the 15th Venice Biennale of Architecture, (www.contestedfronts.org ), as well as the “Hands-on Famagusta” project (www.handsonfamagusta.org).

Secondment destinations:
Wonder Cabinet 2023
Transparadiso 2023
Coventry Biennale 2024
Van Abbemuseum 2024

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Paul Rajakovics

TRANS (transparadiso), Austria

Architect and urbanist, founded transparadiso with the artist Barbara Holub in 1999 as transdisciplinary practice. teaching at the technical university of Vienna; 2018 Österreichischer Kunstpreis, 2007 Otto-Wagner-Award for Urban Design for Salzburg Stadtwerk Lehen; 1994 Tische federal grant at Jean Nouvel’s, Paris; 2001 thesis “contextual acting in architecture and urbanism”, 1997-2003, teaches in differant positions since1997 at University of Technology of Vienna, 2004 Schindler grant, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles,  2004-2006 co-secretary of European Austria, since 2002 member of the editorial board of “dérive – Zeitschrift für Stadtforschung”; 2012 funding by departure for “Direct Urbanism”; 2013 publication “Direct Urbanism”  in Verlag für Moderne Kunst Nürnberg, 2018.

Secondment destination:
TBC

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Marisa Ferreira

Royal College of Art, UK

Marisa Ferreira is an artist and practice based PhD candidate at the Royal College of Art in London with the project: “Waste Matter. Public Art and the (Im) Materiality of Post-Colonial Memory”. Her research is concerned with ruins created by industrial development in places under extractive colonialism and popular resistance, economic dispute and ecological crisis. Her practice focuses on interdisciplinary artistic expressions in particular sculpture and site-specific projects and draws from material culture, “critical spatial practice” and the idea of waste as an agent for “radical change” in order to explore alternative ways to rethink and reimagine a more inclusive politics of memory, sustainable and emphatic urban policy.

Secondment destination:
TBC

www.marisa-ferreira.com
@marisaferreirastudio

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Simon King

Simon King is a walking artist with a socially engaged practice who teaches at the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins in London. Co-founder with Jaspar Joseph-Lester of the cross-disciplinary project ‘Walkative’ at the RCA in 2013, he has worked collaboratively since 2017 with the artist Corinne Noble to create group walks that have an overarching theme or narrative and a distinctive methodology: the use of literal and metaphorical correspondence through ephemera i.e. antique postcards, found maps, archive photographs, fragments of text, as well as personal recollection and speculation, to prompt engagement and interaction with participant walkers.

Simon is a practice PGR PhD candidate at Birkbeck College (supervised by Professor Esther Leslie), whose research investigates the infrastructures of creative and critical practice in relation to walking, dialogue and social engagement.

Secondment destination:
Florence, Italy – November 2022

thewalkativeproject.org

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Andri Christofides

AHDR/Home for Cooperation, Cyprus

Andri is the Manager of the Home for Cooperation (AHDR/H4C). She holds an MSc in Social and Cultural Anthropology from K.U. Leuven, Belgium, where her thesis focused on reinterpreting the transformation of borders and border-spaces in Nicosia, in their symbolic and literal sense. She holds a BA in English Literature from the University of Surrey, UK, where her research focused on the relationship between the postcolonial state of a country and the notion of hostility in national identities. Her evolving academic interest is to undertake her first steps for an interdisciplinary PhD in Social and Cultural Anthropology and Architecture, looking to unpack peacebuilding as a conceptual term, a process and method, in the post conflict context of Cyprus. She is interested to look at the relation of peacebuilding with spatial practices and discursive exchange, and how the multiplicity of stories can affect and enable alternative subjectivities and transformation.

Secondment Destination:
Coventry, UK – 2023

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Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Dr.

Royal College of Art, UK

Jaspar Joseph-Lester is a London-based artist and Head of MA Sculpture at the Royal College of Art (where he is Reader in Art and Post-Urbanism ). His work explores the role images play in urban planning, social space and everyday praxis. His research interests are situated between art making, curating and writing and draw from the fields of architecture, design, urban studies, human geography, philosophy, cinema and media studies, spatial theory and economics. Here Joseph-Lester has focused on the conflicting ideological frameworks embodied in representations of modernity, urban renewal and regeneration as a means to better understand how art practice can redefine the successive cycle of masterplans and regeneration schemes that determine the cultural life of our cities. Key to this work is the development of platforms and frameworks for art that contribute to developing new ways of thinking social and life experiences for the future.

Secondment destination:
transparadiso, Vienna, Austria
Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven NL
A Reserva na Fábrica, Oeiras, Portugal
Kunstverein am Rosa–Luxemburg–Platz, Berlin, Germany

https://www.rca.ac.uk/more/staff/jaspar-joseph-lester/

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