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Working title : floating academy
Master’s students in Scenography from the Norwegian Theatre Academy, in collaboration with architect Anna Puigjaner, will embark on a two-week workshop exploring the possibilities of floating structures. Through research, sketches and practical realizations, they will investigate the spatial, performative, and symbolic dimensions of buoyant architecture and scenography.
The announcement of NTA’s closure in 2026 came as a shock to students, faculty, alumni, and the wider theatre and performance community. In the face of this unexpected decision, they now recognize this moment as a crucial opportunity to harness their skills – using imagination as a tool to envision new futures for the academy and beyond. This workshop marks the beginning of a long-term artistic project, both a tribute and a reflection, a celebration, a ritual of mourning, and a reimagining of NTA’s future. Like vessels unmoored, the academy must set sail into uncertain waters, charting new courses on a voyage of remembrance, resilience, and transformation.
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Anna Puigjaner
Anna Puigjaner is a doctor of architecture, co-founder of MAIO, an architecture studio that works on spatial systems that allow variation and change over time for better social justice. Her personal research focuses on alternative domesticities capable of reformulating biased social structures. She is currently teaching at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation GSAPP at Columbia University. Previously, she was a professor at the Royal College of Arts in London, at the Barcelona School of Architecture ETSAB / ETSAV – UPC and at the Massana School. Between 2011 and 2017 she was part of the editorial team of the magazine Quaderns d’Arquitectura i Urbanisme www.quaderns.coac.net MAIO’s work has been published in journals such as Monocle, Domus, Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, A + U, Architectural Review and Detail, among others, and has been exhibited at the MOMA in New York, at the Royal Academy of London, the Art Institute of Chicago is an art and architecture store. Anna has been a finalist in the Rolex Mentor Protégé Initiative 2016, and awarded the Kitchenless City 2016 Wheelwright Prize for Harvard GSD Research.
Unlock the City EU Project
https://www.unlockthecity.eu/en/
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MA studens participating in the project:
Helena Zaïda Schaber
HelenaZaïdais a scenographer working primarily in theatre and performance art as part of collectives. Her work deals with questions of speculative design and understanding theatre as co-creating with human and non-human actants with a strong focus on materiality and sustainability.
Ingerid Frang
Holds a BA in Architecture and is currently pursuing an MA in Scenography at the Norwegian Theatre Academy. Her work explores the increasingly digital reality that shapes contemporary life, examining how this fragmented existence influences our sense of self and redefines the boundaries of where and how we can exist. Through an interplay of absence and presence, desire and imagination, fiction and reality, she investigates the impact of the digital age, creating works that question and reimagine our relationship with the world around us.
Silvia Kostolanská
An architect by title, currently exploring the world of subcreation and fantasy, while asking very basic scenographic questions and confronting my spatial understanding.
Vilde Stensland Vinje
Is interested in how scenography can be used to activate public spaces, especially places often ignored or that aren’t payed attention to in the everyday life. How can we uncover the opportunities that lay within these spaces and how do we engage with them.
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