Eric Ellingsen

Eric Ellingsen co-directed the Institut für Raumexperimente at the Berlin University of the Arts between 2009 and 2014. Co-directing involved teaching, curating, moderating, critiquing, and administrating. It means helping to choreograph a critically precise field of constantly changing spatiotemporal details.

Eric established Species of Space in 2009 as a platform through which art, architecture, writing and performance can converge through spatial practices. Education is one of his passions. The content of Eric’s teaching centers on the philosophy of pre-and post human nature and ecology, theory of models, the public part of space, art everything, and experiencing experiments.

Ellingsen performs and writes translation poetry experiments, essays, and fictionpoetry. Some writing has appeared in The Chicago Review, Conjunctions on-line, Beloit, Hobart, Landarēfa, Landscape Journal, PANK, Shampoo, and the Scientist, among others. He was an editor of MODELS 306090, and has a book coming out soon called Twisted, which is a book lyric essay, a concrete poems deconcreting. Ellingsen exhibited at art institutions like the Palais de Tokyo (Paris) and the Serpintine Marathon (London), to architecture departments like the ETH (Zurich) and the EiABC (Ethiopian Institute of Architecture Building and Construction). He twists and combines lecture/performances and public walks twisting together ecology and the philosophy of nature. Ellingsen engages disciplines as tools to materialize site-specific hear-specific works. Sometimes he says the word “heart” over and over and over again.

Eric Ellingsen has master’s degrees in Architecture, and Landscape Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, and in Classical Philosophy from St. John’s College. Before moving to Berlin, Eric taught architecture and landscape architecture full time (studios, history, and theory) at the Illinois Institute of Technology, where he also helped start a Masters of Landscape Architecture program, and served as its assistant director. He has taught part time at the University of Toronto and assisted a team of architects surveying and drafting finds and features on an active archaeological dig in Aphrodisias, Turkey. He has also worked as a research assistant for Cecil Balmond, and freelanced shortly at Field Operations. He has been Visiting Faculty at Architecture Art and Planning, Cornell University, in 2014-15.