Maiju Loukola

Introduction

MAIJU LOUKOLA (Doctor of Arts) is an artist-researcher and a university lecturer in artistic research at the Academy of Fine Arts doctoral program. She works with spatial practices and site and situation sensitive installations in urban environment. Her research focuses on the politics of space and speculative spatial, temporal and narrative materialities in contested sites in urban environment.

Maiju is the PI/head of the °City as Space of Rules and Dreaming° research project (funded by Kone Foundation 2021–2024/2025) promoting emancipation and democratisation in urban space by cross-examination through arts and artistic research, empirical urban research, political theory and legal theory. The study strengthens polyphony of urban space and thereby develops a more just city. It asks: How is urban space formed and shared, and who has access to it? What normative and de facto instruments regulate, control and inhabit this space? What kinds of processes, structures and spaces of inclusion and marginalisation, as well as disagreement and controversy are there in the city? What kind of fractures, escape lines and dreams are hidden in the normativity of urban space? What kinds of spaces of shadow, noise, potentialities and dreams are there and how do they actualise?

The °City as Space of Rules and Dreaming° project aims to reach beyond established art-science boundaries by bringing new and more inclusive means of the practices of law and “soft law” to urban decision-making, and inviting different neighborhoods to dream of their own dwelling-regions through imaginary urban archaeology and fictionalising democracy combining different artistic mediums.

The project is coordinated by the Academy of Fine Arts (Doctoral programme) at the University of the Arts Helsinki. Other research group members and project partners are Paul Tiensuu, Doctoral researcher/ Helsinki University Faculty of Law, Tanja Tiekso, Senior researcher/ Helsinki University Faculty of Arts/ Aesthetics, Aino Hirvola, Doctoral researcher/ Aalto University Department of Built Environment, and Jaakko Ruuska, Postdoc researcher/ Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts, and Henna-Riikka Halonen, Postdoc researcher/ Academy of Fine Arts, Uniarts.
MORE ABOUT THE PROJECT: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/3501568/3501569

Maiju was one of the initiators of °The Floating Peripheries – mediating the sense of place° artistic research project (funded by Academy of Finland 2017–2021), a consortium between Aalto ARTS/Dept of Film & Scenography and University of Lapland/Faculty of Art and Design. She finalised her dissertation dealing with mediality and touch as doctoral researcher in the °Figures of Touch° research project (Academy of Finland 2008–2012; parties: Aalto ARTS, Uniarts, University of Helsinki, and University of Linköping)).

Maiju is a member of the editorial board of the RUUKKU Studies in Artistic Research journal and member of editorial committee of Tiede & edistys journal. She is the convener of the Extended Artistic Research Network (EARN) Space + Practice working group (https://artresearch.network/).

ORCID ID: 0000-0002-3262-0242
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