• #31 Mental health - what does architecture have to do with it?
    5 November - 3 December 2024

    CURATOR

    Evelina Bartusevičiūtė

    Evelina Bartusevičiūtė started her architecture studies at the Vilnius Gediminas Technical University, then continued at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where she defended her master's thesis in 2021, titled "Intersections for healing dialogues: the case of the Republican Vilnius Psychiatric Hospital". The essential issues examined in the work include the agency of the individual, ways to empower people in relation to space, the relevant power relations between patients, staff, and the broader society. She is also interested in community engagement in improving mental health, as a result of which she is developing an experimental artistic research platform @avoidlesscommunities for the creation of short or long-term communities. The platform explores the meaning of concepts like individual / (non)stranger / community / society and questions the existing, established norms of architectural typology. In 2022, she was one of the participants of the AF Experiments platform with the project "Avoidless Architecture". Besides architectural practice she is also the co-author of the radio show "Mixed Feelings". In 2023 she matriculates as a bachelor's student in psychology at Vilnius University.

    CURATOR

    Urtė Laukaitytė

    Urtė Laukaitytė is a philosophy PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, where she specialises in philosophy of psychiatry/theoretical psychiatry. Prior to her PhD, she received a cognitive science MSc from the University of Edinburgh and she holds a BA in linguistics from the University of Cambridge. She has published articles in general audience magazines, such as the Public Domain Review, History Today, among others, and she serves as assistant producer for the Many Minds podcast. Her work has been supported by a number of foundations and other grant-awarding bodies; for instance, she has been selected as a Regents fellow, a Chateaubriand fellow, a Global Priorities fellow, a SSNAP fellow, and so on. Urtė spent the year 2022/23 as a Solitude fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude arts residency in Stuttgart. She is involved in various art collaborations - most notably in photography.