Meet the residents of the Melting Platform

In its eighth edition, the HIAP Design Residency will for the first time in 2019 welcome three international practitioners for a transnational exploration into the contemporary culture of design practice. Architects Anna Burlakova and Luke Jones and designer/performer Jérémy Gaudibert will discuss their plans for their residency projects in a panel discussion at the Design Museum on Wednesday 5th of June.

Under the title of “The Melting Platform” Burlakova, Jones and Gaudibert will engage with the sensations of instability that have become a distinct characteristic of the contemporary experience for the deep transformations we witness of our world’s both natural and technical substrates.

Anna Burlakova began her professional path with studies at the Ural State Academy of Architecture and Art. She currently lives and works in Moscow. In her job as an architect at firm Megabudka, she began working with spaces intended for children a few years ago. Since then she has taken part in workshops and participatory design processes with children, which has brought her to want and understand more about the nature of playing, and childhood space. For her interest in how people can develop and influence space when they are in game and acting, Anna plans to create a playspace during the Design Residency.

“I believe that the world of play will turn out to be a thrilling and fun prospective for the architecture. I hope to find alternative professional views on the subject and help. It’s curious that play is what every person understands and is familiar with, as our playgrounds remain with us forever. “

Jérémy Gaudibert works within a plurality of fields, from product and graphic design to a dance practice that embraces both own work and teaching. Originally from France, he settled in Helsinki at the end of 2017. The constant friction between his different interests sparks a drive for research-oriented projects and the desire to seek connections above definitions.

From questioning the use of material and labor in production processes to developing stimulating and engaging images and devices, he is working toward a joyfully provoking appreciation of the verb designing.

Luke Jones is an architect and researcher from London.He works in practice at Mador Architects and lectures in architectural design at the Cass School of Art, Architecture and Design. His research uses speculative design and narrative to explore material and technological development, transformation and estrangement. He works across and between a number of platforms: writing speculative and science fictional worlds with his partner Anna Mill as Mill + Jones, exploring architectural and urban histories and futures as a podcast About Buildings + Cities, and doing projects around urban ecologies, platforms and extended intelligence as part of Heat Island.

“During the residency I’m planning to explore a speculative response to the engineered timber and plywood industries in Finland, and more broadly across Europe. I’ve long been interested in the way that decarbonisation seems to drive incompatible processes. On the one had, through ‘circular economies’ and suppression of embodied carbon, there seems to be an impetus toward local materials, situatedness, zero-freight, a new ‘vernacular.’ But conversely, an ever higher level of desired performance (e.g. zero-carbon in operation) propels specialisation, high tech solutions and scales of operation — larger and more distant plant, serving ever greater areas.”

As in 2018, the Design Residency program will produce a series of events as an offer for dialog with the practitioners and an opportunity to engage discursively in reflections on current strands of thought and practice that are invested with conceptualizing current and formulating future cultures of our interactive-built environment. The talk is the first of this series. Joining them on the conversation will be educational curator at the Design Museum, Hanna Kapanen; programme director of Helsinki Design Week and Helsinki Design Weekly, Anni Korkman; and curator of the Design Residency program, Martin Born.

The HIAP Design Residency is a cooperative production by Helsinki International Artist Programme – HIAP, British Council and Strelka Institute in partnership with Design Museum and Helsinki Design Week. It is supported by the Finnish Embassy in Moscow and the Finnish Consulate General and Finnish Institute in St. Petersburg.

Welcome to the panel discussion at the Design Museum on Wednesday 5th of June at 16.30. More information.