Professor Mull, Head of the university’s School of Architecture and Design, is taking part in ‘Art as Labour: Build and Design’ at Nikola Lenivets outside Moscow, described as the largest art park in Europe.
The venue is a research test bed with 28 art works spread across 650 hectares. The school will “examine the relationship between art and labour in the context of increasing automation and future changes in the notion of ‘labour’, and recent movements in Russian art and architecture that make reference to Russia’s rural past to address the loss of communal identity and cohesion”.
Professor Mull’s summer school will form part of the Global Practice Unit which he founded. The unit, which involves academic partners and live project classrooms in the UK, South Africa, Sweden, Ireland, Russia, Latin America and Korea, is an international multidisciplinary architecture school that gives students the opportunity to pick educational modules from several leading architecture schools around the world and participate in live projects in various classrooms, Nikola-Lenivets Art Park being one of them.
The summer school, from 31 July to 12 August, will explore how art can generate and support communities and create an architectural intervention in the Park in response to this challenge.
World-famous artists and architects will lead the process, including Nikolay-Polissky, founder of the Nikola-Lenivets park, and Alexandr Brodsky, painter and architect, as well as teachers from the Umea School of Architecture (Sweden), Limerick School of Architecture (Ireland), Oxford Brooks University (UK), and MARCH (Russia).