Preview Wednesday 10 June 13.00 – 14.00
Tonia Carless’s collaborative visual research investigating house moving in Västerbotten and Norrland will be exhibited in the UmArts Research Studio. The project investigates wholesale structural moving of buildings in the north of Sweden documenting over 400 moves made by one house-mover (husflyttningar), a common practice in the circumpolar north.
The exhibition presents a moment of destabilisation of the abstract representations of architecture, through temporal mapping and shifting perspective. This mass spatial reconfiguration of buildings creates a speculative exploration of climate, economic and infrastructural change, outside of the planning process. The installation includes the new work The Film the House Made from the point of view from a window of a moving house, looking out across the northern Swedish landscape, territorially fluid but inhabited, immersed and embodied in a circular economy. The project proposes structural house-moving as an architecture of de-growth, and that all buildings can be moved.
Dr Tonia Carless is an artist-architect investigating spatial political of architecture and the circular economy through drawing and visual practice. Her practice based research centres on uneven development and architectural representation. Since 2021 Carless has collaborated with UmArts and Umeå School of Architecture on a research project on moving buildings. She is Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of the West of England Bristol UK, and previously Associate Professor at Umeå School of Architecture.
The exhibition takes place as part of the Latitudes conference at Umeå School of Architecture, and as part of the off-summit program for the Arctic Arts, and isproduced by Tonia Carless and Robin Serjeant with: Sonja Lindgren, Cinematography; Magnus Mårtensson, Töre Husflyttningar; Callum Cording, UWE Digital Cartography; Paul Revell, UWE Printing. With support from: SWECO FFNS Foundation for Research, Development and Education, University of The West of England, Umeå School of Architecture, UmArts. The project was initially developed through an UmArts Small Visionary Project Grant in 2021, and was first shown at the 2025 Copenhagen Architecture Biennial. The exhibition is accompanied by the publication Wide Load (Bred Last) A House Moved (Carless, Serjeant, Roush, 2023) with essays by James Benedict Brown and Matthew Hynam, MSDM publications.