Acting with others: collaborative practices across architecture, design, and radical pedagogies
A series of presentations followed by a discussion and dinner in the garden
With:
Floating (Berlin) / Kristin Lazarova and Jöran Mandik
El Warcha (Tunis) / Aziz Aissaoui, Radhouane Boudhraa, and Marlène Halguevache
Atelier Adhoc Community (Bucharest) / George Marinescu and Daria Oancea
Wednesday, 26 June 2024, 17:00 – 21:00
At The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life
Organised under the frame of the Creative Europe project Architecture, Biodiversity, Culture [ABC]. Building ecological institutions for culture, the event brings together three self-organised practices of civic action that operate at the intersection of different disciplines through collaborative work and ways of coming together that respond to the specific conditions of each site. Driven by an interest and desire to cultivate collaborations, taking care of neighbourhood connections, building temporary urban furniture and installations with local inhabitants, or by developing potential living scenarios for marginalised urban communities, all three projects seek a new language of practice or new practices altogether for imagining and creating different forms of living.
The presentations and discussions are framed in relation to the material and living conditions at The Experimental Station for Research on Art and Life, a site and project co-managed by a group of practitioners outside Bucharest, in the village of Siliștea Snagovului. Speaking from this site of experimentation and from a post developmental paradigm, the event proposes an encounter for collective reflection and discussion around the possibilities to think and practice across disciplines, rural-urban divides, collective action, radical pedagogies, and ways of learning and cohabiting with other humans and nonhumans alike.
The event is open primarily to students and practitioners in architecture, design, art, crafts, or education who can register to the event by sending an email to luftadelina@yahoo.com until 24 June 2024.
We provide transport with a minibus based on prior registration.
Access: by car via DN1 sau A3; with bus 446, departs from Piața Presei Libere, drops at Pescari station, Siliștea Snagovului village.
Floating is a natureculture-learning site located within an overgrown and contaminated rainwater retention basin in the heart of Berlin, Germany, where practitioners from a wide range of backgrounds meet to investigate alternative, biodiverse forms of co-habitation, collaborate, co-create and imaginatively work towards possible futures alongside a wetland ecosystem. Since 2018, Floating University Berlin has been on site as an inner-city laboratory for collective, experiential learning and transdisciplinary exchange. We work to open, maintain and take care of this unique site while bringing non-disciplinary and collaborative programs to the public. It is a place to learn about and experiment with ecology, social equity and new ways of collectively imagining the city. A place to learn to engage, to embrace complexity, to navigate the entanglements of the world, to imagine and create different forms of living.
Kristin Lazarova is the co-founder of Urbane Praxis e.V. and helped set up the Urbane Praxis network office, a Berlin based association that supports the interests of urban practitioners. It builds networks and connects civil society actors, administration and politics in order to shape vibrant and sustainable cities. As an architect and urban planner, she works in the field of cultural urban development, managing, designing and organising projects and events. She is coordinating the Learnscapes program at Floating Berlin.
Jöran Mandik (he/him/they/them) studied Urban Planning and Design at the Technical University Berlin and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. They have been active as an urban practitioner since 2017 working at the intersection of art, urbanism, research and education as a member of Floating e.V., Urbane Praxis e.V. and the action-research project Making Futures Bauhaus+ (Berlin University of the Arts and raumlaborberlin). His work focuses on community activation, story telling, conviviality and facilitation.
El Warcha is a collective and makerspace founded in 2016 in the medina of Tunis. It aims to promote practical education and civic action through the making of temporary furniture, art installations and public events with local residents. Its name, which means ‘the workshop’ in Arabic, reflects its aim to encourage collective action and learning. Experimentation is at the heart of this approach. The workshop offers accessible and intuitive construction techniques, using everyday materials, to test ideas and build prototypes. The workshop initially focused on designing practical elements such as street furniture, play areas and lighting installations with children and teenagers. Over time, more theatrical projects were developed: street cinema, a boxing ring and short science fiction films.
Atelier Ad Hoc Community is an applied research laboratory to support vulnerable or marginalized communities, which seeks to develop intervention scenarios and ways of engaging with poverty scenarios that remain outside or complementary to local public administration concerns. The projects developed by the members of the association are looking for alternative ways to react to the social and spatial realities existing in the city in order to improve the living conditions encountered, adding new proximity links to the existing survival practices and facilitating exchanges and mutual help.
Architecture, Biodiversity, Culture [ABC]. Building ecological institutions for culture is an European cooperation project situated at the intersection between cultural practices, eco-architecture and ecosystems preservation. Initiated by a consortium of organisations active in the fields of culture, contemporary art, architecture, civic activism and eco-sustainable community practices, the project proposes a participatory process of building and cultural contextualising of ecological prototypes to be used by cultural institutions. ABC operates on four sites in Romania, Bulgaria and France: Silistea Snagovului, a village in the proximity of Bucharest, near a protected area of lake and forest; Brezoi, a small town in the South-Western part of Romania, in a mountaneous area and close to an important river; Dren, a village outside of Sofia, in a hilly area; and Bagneux, in the peripheral neighourhoods of Paris.
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.
The event is supported by Goethe-Institut Bucharest and organised in collaboration with Minitremu.
ERSTE Foundation is the main partner of tranzit.ro.
