The study of domestic interiors has been treated separately from the study of public or common exteriors. This separation re-enforces the idea that interiors are and can be sealed and separate from exteriors. Indeed, the separation of domestic spaces from surrounding environment was a myth of the modern age that guided practices and technologies of sealing, separating, and creating barriers between “inside” and “outside.”
What would it look like to go beyond this binary of interior versus exterior? This workshop aims to unseal the study of domestic interiors across geographies, periods, and academic disciplines, so as to draw focus to and detail processes of sealing and unsealing domestic spaces from surrounding environments, variously conceptualized. It seeks to examine questions of domestic interiors and economies in relation to common spaces and communal economies, and in relation to questions of inhabitability, at various scales (from the microbe, to human and more-than-human bodies and beings, such as insects, pets, ghosts, and kitchen gods, to assemblages and planetary scales) and approached through various epistemologies and ontologies (including traditional ecological knowledge, scientific and medical knowledge, vernacular and cultural knowledge, and decolonizing perspectives, among others).
Rethinking Domestic Interiors
Workshop Program
Thursday, May 28, 2026
10am-12pm Session One: Climate and Habitability
Lachlan Fleetwood (Ludwig Maximilian University Munich): “Climate Stability and the Limits of Habitability: Imperial Geography and the Sand-Buried Cities of the Silk Roads”
Lana Uzarashvili (University of Bochum): “The Earth as an Apartment for Humankind: Visions of Planetary Climate and Its Future in Early Soviet Science Fiction”
Tim Altenhof (University of Innsbruck): “Porous Walls and Breathing Skins: Environmental Thinking around 1851”
12pm-1pm lunch served
1pm-3pm Session Two: Sealing and Unsealing Interior Environments
Fabian Thorsten Zimmer (Technische Universität Berlin): “Dusting off the 19th Century Interior. Towards a History of Domestic Environments”
Johanna Conterio (University of Oslo): “Unsealing for Health: Blurring the Boundaries of Built and Unbuilt Environments in Soviet Medical Knowledge and Design, 1920s-1930s”
Rosanna Farbøl (University of Oslo): “Sealed Worlds: Cold War Bunkers and the Fantasy of the Domestic Interior”
3pm-4pm Session Three: Lightning round*
Florence Durney (MF vitenskapelig høyskole)
Johanna Conterio (University of Oslo)
*Audience and workshop participants welcome to sign up on the day
Friday, May 29, 2026
10am-12pm Session Four: Cold War Working, Living, and Survival Environments
Rosanna Farbøl (University of Oslo): “Sealed Worlds: Cold War Bunkers and the Fantasy of the Domestic Interior” (moved to May 28 for reasons of scheduling).
Kasia Jezowska (University of New South Wales / Centre for Advanced Study, Oslo): “Humanist tendencies and industrial aesthetics. Spaces for work and life in socialist Poland”
Paris Bezanis and Galena Sardamova (LINA Fellows, LINA Architecture Platform), “Healing Landscapes: Ruination and Reclamation in Black Sea Bathing Cultures”
11:30am-12pm Discussion of Future Publications and Projects
12pm-1pm Meeting with members of the Centre for Advanced Study Material Ecologies of Design group
1pm-2pm Lunch
Workshop convener
Dr Johanna Conterio
Associate Professor of Environmental History
University of Oslo
Department of Archaeology, Conservation and History
PB 1008, Blindern, NO-0315 Oslo, Norway
Johanna.Conterio@iakh.uio.no