Erika Henriksson is a building architect and practice-based researcher working in an intersection between architecture, craft and art.
Her field is altering practices of architecture and reoccurring themes in her work are social and material relations, ethics of care and ways to spatially engage with speculations of life itself.
Influenced by feminist ethics and values, Erika works in performative and exploratory manners that emanate from personal relations to people, environments and materials.
By letting go of control and pre-set goals she develops building projects and large-scale spatial installations that are not planned out beforehand, but which unfolds together with the circumstances of the context where she is working.
Something that for example is done through engagements with local economies and explorations in low-impact building techniques; An approach that manifests a longing to construct alternative paths away from dominant and hegemonic forces of efficiency, categorization and economic value.
Architherapy is a self-built practice and concept, crafted as a relational and improvisatory process that takes form by learning to think and make together with the whole ecological system of materials, people, stories, environments and forces that surround life and architecture.
The practice has been taking form through a four year long explorative process of transforming an old and abandoned building, standing next to a rehabilitation clinic in a small rural locality in Sweden. A project which started out as a collaboration between Erika and two patients at the clinic. During the presentation Erika will present Architherapy through a storytelling of the relational project which gave it shape.
At the moment Erika is finalizing her practice based PhD-thesis, Performing Architherapy – About crafting a building practice for caring relations and working on a site-specific spatial installation in the forest of Rena, Norway.
