Catalysti x Taidekoulu MAA collaboration is an online Thursday Lecture Series inviting transcultural artists, curators, and cultural professionals based in Finland or elsewhere in the world to talk about their research and practice in an open and free to all discussion.
Previously the series emphasised on the critical reflection and gaps in mainstream art education through a series of questions, one of which was: Which histories are missing from the curricula?
This fall the Thursday Lecture Series explores the role of contemporary art and the work of the artist in society as situated within the current ecosocial and sociopolitical context we live in. The main question of the series is: What is at Stake? with an emphasis on borders (physical, conceptual, legal), displacement, site-sensitivity and history, migration, memory, emotional landscapes, political body, rituals, food politics and cultural heritage through the lecturers’ gazes.
The artists and curators invited are of diverse professional backgrounds and arrive to the series from different schools of thoughts spanning philosophy, comparative literature, visual arts, filmmaking, performance art, art education, anthropology, academic and artistic research, curation, aesthetics, transdisciplinary design, writing, food art research, sculpture, archival research, and feminism.
The lectures offer audiences a direct contact with cultural professionals, artists, and curators whose work challenges the status quo in contemporary art and society.
TIMES, DATES and COMMITMENT
The lectures are held on Thursdays from 10.00 to 11.30am online on the Zoom platform.
17.9.2026
Myriam Diatta
Author
On “Doing Creative Work from Your Political Body”, moderated by Dahlia El Broul.
Join Myriam Diatta for a reading and conversation on her new book, Doing Creative Work from Your Political Body: A Guide and Process for Practice-led Research, published with Set Margins’. The event will be dedicated to the daily work that politically engaged designers, writers, performers, visual artists, musicians, educators, researchers, and cultural workers do.
While the academies, cultural institutions, and universities around us tend to separate practice and theory, we will invite you to reflect: What do you make and where? What socio-political realities do you engage with? And, at the heart of the exploration, how might you nurture the making, being, thinking, and reading you do—all at once?
Myriam D. Diatta is a designer and independent scholar. Her practice focuses on the interior at the intersection of politically engaged work and creative knowledge production. Myriam is Black-Asian, Japanese-Diola, with a political and creative foundation nurtured in New York City. She is currently based in Aarhus, Denmark.
24.9.2026
Sepideh Rahaa
Artist and researcher
On the position of art and artists in today’s society.
Join Sepideh Rahaa in a conversation on “what is the position of art and artists in today’s world?”
Sepideh Rahaa is a multidisciplinary artist based in Helsinki, Finland. She investigates and questions prevailing power structures, social norms, and conventions while focusing on womanhood, storytelling, and everyday resistances. She aims to initiate and create spaces for dialogue, influenced by feminist politics, decolonial and postcolonial theories and practices as well as social and environmental justice.
Currently she is pursuing her doctoral studies in Contemporary Art at Aalto University. Rahaa’s work has been exhibited extensively in Europe, North Africa, East and South-West Asia, including venues such as Kiasma Contemporary Art Museum, Lahti Art Museum MALVA, Rauma Art Museum Rauma Triennale 2022, Artsi Art Museum 2021 and Pori Art Museum 2019. In recent years she exhibited at Lahore Biennial 03 (2024), Karachi Biennial KB24 (2024), Liverpool Biennial (2023) and Helsinki Biennial (2023).
Since 2015, Rahaa has been actively participating actively regarding the role of art institutions and collectives in the Finnish art scene. She has been a member and co-founder at Third Space Collective (2015-), board member of Globe Art Point (2016-2021) as well as Culture for All (2017-2021), and Nordic Network for Norm Critical Leadership (2018-), among other collaborative and collective works.
W: https://www.sepidehrahaa.com/
1.10.2026 –
Micol Curatolo
Art worker, curator and producer Micol Curatolo
On the politics of space and participation in independent curatorial work.
Join Micol Curatolo in a conversation on “how can independent curatorial practices support the capacity of a community to access artistic work, learn from artistic work, gather and organise around it?”
Micol Curatolo is an artworker and curator based in Helsinki. Her practice explores the politics of space, labour, and learning, with a focus on feminist and antiracist work. ‘SLOW — Seasonal Laboratories for Other Worlds’ is her independent curatorial project that explores artistic research as a place for trans-local learning by hosting collaborative work in the exhibitions’ design and activation. The programme draws connections between bodies, geographies, and economies by bringing international artistic practices, local actors and grass-root projects together at work, responding to struggles that might appear across places. Her research explores how art can help us navigate the (global) politics of space, and learn to imagine, relate, and organise otherwise.
Micol is the Chair of The Curators Association Finland and the Vice Chair of Arte ry, the artists organisation running Titanik gallery in Turku, Finland. In 2025, she developed a practice-based research on ‘Border politics in contemporary curatorial practice’ and initiated the project ‘SLOW – Seasonal Laboratories for Other Worlds’ in collaboration with the Museum of Impossible Forms, Helsinki. Between 2022 and 2025, she worked as the coordinator of the educational program of PUBLICS, Helsinki. She holds a bachelors in History of Art at the University of East Anglia (Norwich, UK, 2021) and a masters in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art at Aalto University (Espoo, Finland, 2024). She is a participant of CuratorLab 2026-2027 in Konstfack University (Stockholm, Sweden). In 2026, her work is supported by the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
W: https://www.micolcuratolo.com/
22.10.2026
Julia Fidder
Writer and curator
On methodologies fostering collectivity and connectedness, both in grief and within institutional and artistic practice.
Join Julia Fidder in a conversation exploring methodologies that make grief public and shared within a context where grief and mourning are influenced by capitalism and neoliberalism, causing it to be rushed and privatized, moderated by Olga Spyropoulou.
Julia Fidder is a writer and curator based between The Netherlands and Finland. She works both independently and as an institutional curator connected to artist-led organization SEA Foundation. She is director of Text my Sister, which she founded together with Michaela Davidova. Previously she published texts with Flash Art CZ, Metropolis M, De Kunstmeisjes and Helsinki Biennial 2023 amongst others. Fidder graduated from the Master in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art at Aalto University. Fidder has worked for several art institutions including Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma (Helsinki, Finland), De Kunstmeisjes (The Netherlands), Helsinki Biennial 2023 and MU Hybrid Art House (Eindhoven, The Netherlands).
Within her practice she focuses on themes regarding grief, rituals, (institutional) healing and collective structures of living and working together. Fidder explores collaborative strategies and working methods that stem directly from this thematic research and has over the past years been investigating grieving as a curatorial method. Resulting from this, she underlines the importance for reciprocity and shared agency in her collaborations. Her thinking and work regarding grief has been largely inspired by thinkers, writers and grief tenders like Camille Sapara Barton, Judith Butler, Darcy Harris, Cindy Milstein as well as stories of individual grievers as well as all artists and practitioners that were connected to her projects so far.
29.10.2026
Jay Mar Albaos
Anthropologist and artistic researcher
On Artist? Talk? Conversing with the Other
Join Jay Mar Albaos in a conversation on How does a body present its position in relation to the world it is navigating in? What are the artistic, theoretical, and cultural implications is that body is assigned the role as the Other? Within performance and migration contexts, what does the migrant Other’s body mean within relevant/relative European spaces? In this session, Jay – together with an online audience – will exchange about lived experiences, body of work(s) as a performance of artistic, and conceptual reflections as a researcher.
Jay Albaos (1991) explores how migrants—workers, students of color, undocumented people— create place and selfhood in foreign environments. His method, artistic immersion, uses collaboration, participation, and dialogue to foster artistic creation and engage in migration (policy) contexts. A former community worker with Indigenous Peoples and a theatre performer, he later studied Live Art and Performance Studies in Helsinki and earned an advanced MA in Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies at KU Leuven. He is now a doctoral candidate at LUCA School of Arts/KU Leuven while working full-time at Decathlon. His work entwines anthropology, ethnography, and performance – moving between solo pieces and (community) collaborations. Born in Dipolog, Philippines, Jay is based in Gent, Belgium.
12.11.2026
Efi Savvides
Visual artist and educator
On “Richmond Village”, an unauthorised settlement at the British Sovereign Base Area of Dhekelia in Cyprus.
Join Efi Savvides on a conversation on her artistic research regarding the home to refugees whose boat had washed ashore at the Akrotiri Sovereign Base in 1998.
Efi Savvides is a visual artist and art educator, and founder of Artstudio Laboratories, an art education hub active in Nicosia since 1985. Her practice explores exclusion, displacement and belonging, focusing on the lived experiences of migrants and refugees in Cyprus.
Through long-term, trust-based engagement, she works with photography, video, drawing and archival material to document everyday life in conditions of uncertainty and confinement. Her research-driven practice also examines how spaces of displacement become places of habitation, and how memory and material traces preserve the stories of communities rendered temporary and unseen.
Her recent film series, Contesting Migration, explores migration and border regimes in the Mediterranean, while her Afterlight series (2020–24) turns inward, examining memory, identity and aging through reworked family photographs.
Savvides has exhibited widely in Cyprus and internationally.
19.11.2026
Joana Quiroga
Artist, art researcher, and philosopher
On Food, Body, Domestication, and Colonization
A conversation on whether the imposition of food like wheat products (specifically through domestication and colonization) have shaped not only our bodies, but also our mindsets.
Joana Quiroga is a philosopher from Brazil who became a visual artist to give Philosophy a closer presence to everyday life and in dialogue with social causes and struggles. In her work, she investigates how different power relations, and their consequent inequalities, can live hidden in our daily lives. To do this, she “zooms in” on things normally considered “obvious”, like air, bread, time, water, and stomach: more than an abstraction, she asks with things about who we are, in a sincere quest for other understandings, and with that, changes.
At the moment she is a PhD researcher at University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland, with a project about inequality through bread and wheat, specially focusing their presence in Brazil, asking also how this may have influenced our (western) way of thinking and our body consistencies. Always using a wide range of media, she has participated in exhibitions, projects and residencies in places like Akademie Schloss Solitude (Germany), Academy of the Arts of Novi Sad (Serbia), Ars Kosara (Bosnia Herzegovina), among others.
Links: www.joanaquiroga.com / Instagram
26.11.2026
Alejandra Alarcón
Artist and designer
On food as an artistic medium
Join Alejandra Alarcón in a conversation on “what does it mean to work with food as an artistic medium?”
Alejandra Alarcón (she/her) is an interdisciplinary Mexican artist and designer based in Helsinki, working at the intersection of food and art. Her interest in (food) sustainability—the socio-political, cultural, and ecological dimensions—is strengthened by a decolonial and ecofeminist approach to knowledge production. Her practice moves between artistic research, performance, installation, independent publishing, and photography. She uses walking, writing, drawing, baking, foraging, and cooking as artistic tools to investigate themes of commensality, belonging, and the seasonality of things. In her work, she also explores relationships between different cultures and social structures through ingredients, culinary rituals, and flavor, as she has encountered them across Mexico and Finland.
Alarcón holds an MA in Contemporary Design (2023) from Aalto University and a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design (2019) from Universidad Iberoamericana Ciudad de México. In 2025, she completed the Alternative MA Food and Art online programme by the Gramounce. Alarcón has been awarded residencies at Acme in London, Museum of Impossible Forms in Helsinki, Mediamatic in Amsterdam, and EMMA Kreativzentrum in Pforzheim.
3.12.2026 – Lecture TBC
Notice: More info on each artist’s talk will be published soon.
Art School Maa follows equity guidelines against any form of discrimination. We require reading our guidelines for working together before attending the event.
HOW MUCH AND WHAT ARE YOU PAYING FOR
The Lecture Series is free of charge and open to all.
HOW TO REGISTER
For single attendance, request the link by sending an email to .
In order to sign up for all future lectures, send us an email to saying you wish to be added to the lecture mailing list.
GUIDELINES FOR WORKING TOGETHER
Art School Maa is a community for art and education that creates spaces for critical thinking and artistic practices. We seek new ways of expression and challenge our ways of working together. In order to share space in a way that supports , we will have to navigate different voices, practices and experiences. Maa’s guidelines are a starting point for doing this. Read the guidelines here.
ABOUT TAIDEKOULU MAA
Art School Maa understands “people” as a word for anyone who wishes to learn art and creative practices, for artists who come together to rethink what they are doing, why and for whom, and for citizens who wish to recognise agency and meaning in their environments.
People’s Art Programme is Art School Maa’s answer to the ongoing changes in art education and cultural funding in Finland. It maintains a critical view of art and art education. It includes, recognises and promotes diversity of practices, self-organisation and alternative voices.
The project is supported by TAIKE (Arts Promotions Centre Finland)
