Olga Krasa-Ryabets | Non-places and experimental culture: the urban apartment as site of creative intervention

Punctum has been described as the “living room of culture,” and it’s known for it’s location, imbedded in one of Prague’s iconic vnitrobloks, and for the sense of community it built over the years. This makes it an ideal setting for a lecture and workshop on the relationship between domestic space, creativity, and resistance. Drawing on over a decade of my own artistic practice in apartments in Amsterdam and Prague, this session explores why homes and domestic interiors have long served as important sites for cultural production, from the Middle Ages to contemporary experimental art. Philosophers and theorists such as Gaston Bachelard and Mark Turner have argued that the spaces we inhabit shape our sense of self: home is where identity is rehearsed, stabilized, and felt most intimately. Because domestic environments provide continuity and familiarity, they help people maintain a coherent sense of who they are. At the same time, when uncertainty or artistic intervention enters these spaces, the home can become something else entirely: a threshold space outside ordinary social rules, where new forms of imagination, encounter, and resistance become possible. Through examples from apartment theatre, historical folklore, and contemporary performance, the lecture considers how ambiguity, intimacy, and atmosphere transform private space into a cultural laboratory. Participants will gain new perspectives on how environments shape identity and creativity, while the workshop component invites them to reflect on and experiment with the hidden theatrical, political, and emotional potential of their own living spaces. This proposal is especially timely as cultural institutions increasingly seek more intimate, participatory, and community-based formats beyond conventional venues.About the lecturer:Dr. Olga Krasa-Ryabets is a Canadian-Ukrainian theatre director and researcher based in Prague. She has been previously active at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (NICA).Olga is the founder of the independent Centre for Aliative and Trivial Research (CenAR) where she has hosted events like the Symposium for Odd Research and created performances for over a decade. Her areas of interest include cognitive humanities and archeology of the everyday. Her most recent collaboration with the theoretical physicist Marek Liška explored the creation of imaginary black holes in urban apartments.She holds a Theatre Specialist BA with Honours (University of Toronto), an MA in Alternative Theatre Directing and Puppetry (Academy of Performing Arts in Prague) and a PhD in Theatre Studies from the University of Amsterdam with a dissertation titled Secret Theatre: off-the-grid performance practices in socialist Poland and Czechoslovakia (2019). Most recently, her work has been published in the Performance Research Journal and by Palgrave Press.www.aliatology.comlanguage: Englishdoor: 19:00 | lecture 19:30entry by voluntary donation- – -Punctum Theory Club is a series of occasional talks, discussions and other for