The Winter Garden-terrarium is a performative installation by Alejandro Haiek at the “Retake/Reuse: experiments to reactivate public space” public event, seminar coordinated by Maria-Luna Nobile and Marie Kraft from Circolo Scandinavo. The research proposal was granted as small visionary project by the Research Center for Architecture, Design and the Arts (UmArts) and presented at Umeå University Arts campus. The prototype was developed in collaboration with an interdisciplinary project team composed by Tomas Mena, Rebecca Rudolph, Raffaelle Errichiello and Alejandra Diaz, with student participation from Deniss Zeile and technical support by Håkan Hansson, Kent Brodin and Sven-Erik Hilberer from UMA school of Architecture; alongside Fatemeh Morandi from the UXlab, School of Informatics, with the students team: Hiran Herath, Kevin Charles Dalli, Parisima Alaie, Viktor Sjöström, William Sahlin, and advised by Gesche Blume-Werry from the Department of Ecology and Environmental Sciences, Umeå University, Sweden.

The preliminary research on winter environments, supported by the Umeå Research Center for Architecture, Design and the Arts – UmArts, ended up in a winter garden eco-installation at the Arts-Campus of Umeå University in Sweden. In a transdisciplinary collaboration between Umeå School of Architecture, UXlab, the Department of Informatics, and the Department of Environmental Sciences, the public installation invites to debate about the dilemmas and paradoxes around sustainability today.