Following our open call to UK-based practitioners for a design residence in Helsinki, we are pleased to announce that researcher, artist and curator Teresa Dillon has been selected as the recipient for the Helsinki residency programme 2015, taking place in August and September. This is the fourth residency that the British Council is running in Helsinki in partnership with Helsinki International Artist Programme (HIAP) and Helsinki Design Week (HDW).

The residency programme this year is set around the theme of Time Machine and focuses on imagining future plans for the city of Helsinki.Teresa’s proposal will consist of explorations, research, field trips, conversations and visualisations aimed at identifying a typology of free-to-use urban hut, for Helsinki, to be used by future tourists visiting the city.Teresa explains, in a short statement here, the exciting plans for her research and objectives, while on the residency:

"I went to the city because I wished to explore it deliberately, to feel what it was like and soak in its landscape”

Imagine this is a statement from a person who is visiting Helsinki. They have come to the city not to shop, do business, party or visit someone but simply to wander across the city landscape, enjoy its contours, ramble in and out of its neighbourhoods, feel it out. We do something similar when we go walking in the countryside. Usually this activity is considered as restorative, a means to "get away from it all”. Is it possible to think of the city in this way, as a place for rambling, restoring energy and contemplation?

Borrowing from the Scottish, Irish, English & Welsh tradition of the Bothy and the Finnish Wilderness Hut, the Urban Hut explores the potential for creating an open, free-to-use hut, which anyone visiting the city can have access to use for an overnight stay. What if such Urban Huts existed in Helsinki, what would they look like? Where would they be located? And how would they be cared for and managed?

The Urban Hut explores new living structures and objects, which can act as means to rethink how we exist in cities and foster sensibilities towards a new form of urban tourism and civic commons.

Further details about Teresa's work can be found at polarproduce.org and urbanknights.org.