The Environmental Art students from the Art Academy of Latvia engage with the APE in a short course led by APE’s 2024 artistic research grant holder, Lia Carreira.
by Lia Carreira, Palácio das Belas Artes Lisboa
In March 2026, APE’s 2024 artistic research grant holder, Lia Carreira, held a short course at the Art Academy of Latvia on Digital Spatialities, where she presented the Palácio das Belas Artes Lisboa (PdBA) artistic methodology to students from the university’s Bachelor and Master programmes in Riga.
This one-week-long course, situated within the academy’s Environmental Art programme, included a session on how to use the APE online platform for artistic inquiry. On this occasion, students learned about the importance and the many strategies for finding archival materials online, with a focus on the Latvian archives and region.
At the end of the course, the 11 participants were asked to present a project proposal that envisioned, in line with the PdBA Lisboa methodology, another relationship with rural and urban spaces through digital means. These spanned from revitalising abandoned historic houses and industrial sites, creating awareness over environmentally endangered public green spaces, and repurposing hidden wartime bunkers for interactive storytelling and art exhibitions.
The initiative was led by Professor Linda Vilka, as part of the Erasmus+ mobility scheme, which enables cross-border exchange between professionals and university programmes within the EU.
