Besides assisting INSIDE students in developing their projects, as well as with their overall progress throughout this academic year, we were very happy to organise and host this lecture series for them.
This year’s ‘Lunch Lectures’ program consisted of four lectures and a total of ten guest speakers who are active in fields of INSIDE's spectrum of interest. Our goal was to bring students in touch with professionals from the disciplines of architecture and design as well as from the local art scene, creating space for dialogue and questions, regarding students’ future practices and potential steps after graduation.
The speakers, Eliane Esther Bots, Jana Romanova, Ildikó Horváth, Felipe van Laar, Ilaria Palmieri, Caterina Tioli, Julianna Graef, Charlotte Skye, Luka Smišek and Nasma Monawer Alshutfa, that come from various stages of the professional world, were asked not only to present their work and methodologies, but also their early professional steps, obstacles they might have encountered and advice they would give to young professionals in the Dutch design and art field.
With this cycle of Lunch Lectures, together with our guest lecturers and students, we aimed to question and reflect on space through the lens of different disciplines—and to remind ourselves once again of the many forms a spatial practice can take. We hoped to create an opportunity for students to meet practitioners, gain insight into their working methods and research, and draw inspiration from the diverse approaches that exist within the field. In doing so, we also wanted to highlight the rich and layered context that surrounds spatial practice today, and to support students in positioning themselves within it.
It was a great joy for us to organize and host this series, and we’re very grateful to our guest lecturers, the students who engaged with each session, and the INSIDE department for helping to make this exchange and dialogue possible.
The first Lunch Lecture of the year took place during the Academy’s Open Day, on the 30th of November 2024. Given that this day is open to the public, and mainly to people that are considering applying to the various Bachelor and Master programs, we thought it was a good idea to host a talk and Q&A with recent INSIDE graduates! Therefore, we invited alumni Ilaria Palmieri and Caterina Tioli (2022), Julianna Graef and Charlotte Skye (2023), Luka Smišek and Nasma Monawer Alshutfa (2024). By presenting their current work, each guest talked about their unique visions, positions and goals, while sharing their recent experience of studying at the Interior Architecture Master Program.
Photo credits: Athina Botonaki
For the second Lunch Lecture of the year, we decided to invite artists Ildikó Horváth and Felipe van Laar.
Amsterdam-based artist Ildikó Horváth, shared her explorations on how we experience the fluidity of the physical, the mental and the virtual. As Ildikó works with tactile materials, sound and digital media, she often collaborates with performers to address temporality and bodily engagement through the performer-audience interaction.
Felipe van Laar, Utrecht-based artist with an architectural background, shared his fascination about places that ‘acquire significance’. Taking inspiration from everyday surroundings, such as the architecture of chappels or buildings under construction or decay, he aims for moments where materiality meets meaning. His work, which mainly consists of large-scale spatial installations and sculptures, is often described as indefinite and unfinished.
The two guests, after presenting their work, answered student’s questions as well as questions they posed to each other, regarding their back-stories, methods and references, unfolding a very inspiring and fruitful discussion.
Ildikó Horváth, ‘Centre OFF Gravity’ (2023) - photo credits:Alex Heuvink
Felipe van Laar, ‘De profundis’ landscape installation (2022) - photo credits:Felipe van Laar
For the third lecture, we invited Jana Romanova, a multidisciplinary artist based in The Hague. With a background in photography, Jana works with performance and play practices, “researching how games, play, and playfulness can become tools for building meaningful connections.”[1] As part of her artistic work, she designs and facilitates LARPs (Live Action Role Plays) in physical spaces.
In her talk, “LARP as a Tool for Creating Spaces,” Jana shared examples of LARP she has designed, as well as a few that inspire her. She spoke of LARP as a form of collective storytelling—where roles, rules, and spatial conditions come together to shape new ways of relating and communicating. While her work doesn’t engage with space in a conventional architectural sense, it offered a new perspective on how space can be formed through interaction, embodiment, and narrative—reminding us that space is not only constructed, but also performed, played, inhabited, and felt.
Inspired by Jana’s practice, we later created and facilitated a LARP at INSIDE, connected to the students’ Studio 3 projects.The game became a way to explore local narratives—real, fictional, or imagined—and to experiment with playfulness and storytelling as a tool for spatial intervention.
[1] https://janaromanova.com/about
Photo credits: Athina Botonaki
For the final lecture of the year, we invited Eliane Esther Bots—a filmmaker and visual artist working in the broader areas of documentary film, installation, performance, audio, and publications. Since many students within the INSIDE program use moving image to present and research the layered topics they engage with, we wanted to speak with Eliane about filmmaking as a narrative practice—about the ways in which fiction and non-fiction can blend and overlap within documentary, and how storytelling functions in her work, both conceptually and methodologically.
Narration—and the many forms it can take—is a recurring thread in Eliane’s practice. Her work unfolds around the idea of the “narrating self”, as she explores the “shifts in narrative position and story that occur when people experience disruptive, life-changing events or conflict.”[2] During the lecture, titled “Voicing Spaces,” she shared both her process and several key projects, including “In Flow of Words”, “Cloud Forest”, and “The Daughters, The Interpreters and The Family”.
We watched and discussed excerpts from her films together, paying attention to Eliane’s method and to how spatial conditions are created—or brought to light—in her work. We talked about how space can hold a narrative, how it can activate memory or emotion, and how the framing of a scene or the presence of a room can shape the way a story is told and received.
[2] https://twosmallthings.com/bio
Still from Eliane’s short film ‘In Flow of Words’ (2021)