Finissage Event: Dreaming Suburbs 

Join us for an evening of presentations by historian Anna Livia Vørsel and theorist and urban designer Helen Rix Runting as they discuss their respective research projects and engage in a conversation on architectural history, urban development, and the fate of Stockholm’s suburban planning. This is the culminating event in Dreaming Suburbs, an exhibition dedicated to the pressing questions of housing, gentrification, and how art operates within contested urban processes, exploring the peripheries where cultural production and urban transformation happen concurrently.

Anna will present her research on the now demolished, parklek building in Fagerlidsparken, located just behind Konsthall C, and her study on a ‘mould-like’ smell in the building and its complicated historical entanglement with welfare service expansion in Stockholm suburbs in the 1970s, prefabricated building elements and toxic chemical manufacturing. The research is from a chapter in her thesis, Building Accounts: A Material History of Three Ordinary Welfare Service Buildings in Stockholm (1969-2025), available for reading inside the Dreaming Suburbs exhibition. 

Helen Rix Runting will present the artwork “The Upside Down Triangle,” which she produced as a part of Secretary, alongside Rutger Sjögrim. Secretary is an architecture office dedicated to exploring architecture at the scale of the population located in Högdalen. Featured in the Dreaming Suburbs exhibition, “The Upside Down Triangle” is a new work of speculative fiction, wherein Secretary manipulate found imagery from apartment buildings approved in Stockholm municipality last year (2025) to reimagine Stockholm’s southern suburbs’ architectural present as a site of austerity-resistant spatial surplus.

About: Anna Livia Vørsel is an architectural historian and researcher. She recently completed her PhD at the School of Architecture at KTH, Royal Institute of Technology. Her work investigates how socio-political and economic conditions are registered and stored in the materiality of buildings. It includes studies of building material histories, toxic indoor environments, governance and the neoliberalisation of the Swedish welfare state. She is currently the project manager for the Art + Research programme at Accelerator konsthall.  

Helen Rix Runting is an architectural theorist and urban designer. Her work explores how architecture organizes life at the scale of the population. Helen writes, edits, reviews, and makes objects and research in relation to this theme: she has published in e-flux architecture, Avery Review, monu, and Journal of Architecture, and writes regularly for the magazine Arkitektur; she is also co-author of 14,495 Flats: A Metabolist's Guide to New Stockholm (2021) and co-editor of Urbanizing Suburbia: Hyper-Gentrification, the Financialization of Housing and the Remaking of the Outer European City (2023) and Architecture and Feminisms: Economies, Ecologies, Technologies (2017). She is also copyeditor on a range of contemporary publications addressing architecture and the city. Before starting Secretary, she worked with master planning projects in Australia, Vietnam, Finland, and Sweden; since 2017, she has led a number of Secretary's exhibition projects, research collaborations, and design processes. She holds a PhD in Architecture from KTH in Stockholm (2018) and is co-curator, together with Ulrika Flink, of the Bruges Triennial 2027. As a bi-lingual migrant, transdisciplinary practitioner, and practice-based researcher, her work is driven by the conviction that through another architecture, another world is possible.