Category: Public Space

P | A | N – Proyecto Amasandería Nacional

P | A | N – Proyecto Amasandería Nacional (2016)

Espacios Revelados / Changing Spaces
Barrio Yungay, Santiago, Chile

Proyecto Amasandería Nacional is a mobile bakery that travels the streets of Barrio Yungay inviting the newly arrived communities of immigrants to participate in a collective action: to produce and bake their own bread.  The bread then becomes a vehicle for social integration and a catalyst for the production of cohesive public space in a neighborhood challenged by the flows and clashes of new cultures.

Proyecto Amasandería Nacional was developed as part of a public art initiative that aimed to engage art, community and heritage in the dilapidated Barrio Yungay in Santiago, Chile. Yungay, lately designated a conservation area, is the oldest planned neighbourhood in the city centre, long left to decay as a social and economic backwater, and now increasingly gentrified by those wanting to reclaim the area’s latent grandeur.

Proyecto Amasanderia Nacional aims to contribute to the discussion on heritage and community by revisiting simultaneously two equally important aspects when reading Barrio Yungay: its material heritage – i.e. its architectures and material state – and its immaterial heritage, the cultural capital of those who live in those same buildings.   P | A | N proposes a participatory device through the temporary activation of public space, to bring visibility and to document the different aspects and values of heritage; but also, to create a vehicle for social integration for communities in conflict with or within the territory they inhabit.

P | A | N: Kneading dough while knitting communities

The image of bread in its universal simplicity and, at the same time, cultural density, becomes the catalyst for the processes that the project wants to articulate: 1) the making of bread as a highly inclusive production process; 2) the act of kneading dough as a space for play where to erase categories and hierarchies; 3) the exercise of collective production as a space of (intellectual) transference between participants and material (your bread represents you); and finally, 4) the concretion of a transaction as a direct translation of participation – your time is represented by the amount of kilos of bread baked.

Credits:

Catalina Pollak Williamson in collaboration with students of the Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design, Universidad Diego Portales.

P | A | N was commissioned for the Changing Spaces initiative by the Siemens-Stiftung Foundation.

LINKS:

www.publicinterventions.org

 

 

Trade Deptford

Trade Deptford is a local platform hosting events and debate, exploring the theme of local identity, gentrification and role of the citizen in Deptford, South East London.

Over the course of 6 months we will deliver and test a new market forum for Deptford. A new typology that aims to position the artist/architect as a lever for positive social change, the output being a way to give people a voice and ultimately change the equation art = gentrification to, art = local resilience.

Each market develops new themes to engage different demographics in Deptford, to both gain understanding and develop evidence for a future citizen led neighbourhood plan – delivered by Deptford Neighbourhood Action. Through the direct participation in each forum, local residents working together with local artists and designers will attempt to unpick the impact of gentrification in Deptford.

Thus far we have hosted 3 of the 5 events; EAT Deptford – sought to bring people together over a collective meal to discuss the future of Deptford High street. MAP Deptford was a collective mapping exercise, allowing residents to create desire maps for the future which contested the actuality of the incoming housing developments. RADIO Deptford engaged with gentrification and local identity through listening to specific sites identified by the community. With participants responding to the question, “What is the sound of gentrification?”

Over the next two months the forum will host ACT Deptford – a forum theatre piece, and the Deptford ASSEMBLY – a final symposium of local activist groups.

Ultimately the aim of this participatory process is two fold;

1. To draw together the plethora of separate activist groups campaigning in Deptford – to create a network of activists working towards an improved public and civic life in Deptford.

2. To utilise the powers of the 2011 Localism Act to draw this research and energy into a Neighbourhood Plan. Neighbourhood plans offer local citizens an opportunity to make key decisions about the future of their defined neighbourhoods, allowing residents/activists to protect spaces and create sites for future community use.

Through the creation and engagement with this participatory process, we can begin to plan for the future of Deptford’s public spaces. One which gives local  residents voice and challenges the current trend of market led gentrification marginalising existing communities in London.

Tradeptford is delivered in collaboration between Assembly SE8 and public works

www.tradeptford.co.uk

 

With thanks to all our collaborators;

DNA

Ultra-Red

Veronika Szabo and River

The Order of Things

Explore Everything

The spatial mirror, reflections and reflexes in collective place-making

The spatial mirror, reflections and reflexes in collective place-making.

An elective course for master students at the Faculty of Architecture, KU Leuven, campus Sint-Lucas Brussel.

 

An action based design and research studio

to debate / experiment / exchange / co-produce / participate /

criticise / construct / occupy / question / manifest / act / etcetera…

toward open urbanism in Brussels.

During one semester, a mix of international students comes together to explore what participatory design can be, both for the city as for themselves as architects to-be. The Josaphat site in Brussels and its self-organized community-based initiatives form the ground around which several challenges evolve.

 

1/.            What inspires you?

2/.            Tell me your story.

3/.            How do you relate?

4/.            Map !

5/.            What is at stake?

6/.            Now and then.

7/.            Manifest.

 

What would you, as architect and as human being, propose as an ad hoc intervention for this hidden land? How could this affect its planned future as new densely build neighborhood?

These questions trigger a variety of creative and critical design interventions. The ‘Universal Alphabet’ (Teodora & Nikoletta) take on a consultation approach. Through playing with words and languages they reach out to various stakeholders. An intuitive, yet strongly informed development process is the outcome of this approach. Others let themselves get overwhelmed by the hidden qualities of this place and intervene in a soft and embedded manner (Marisa & Oahn). The boys (Matthias & Nicolas), use their position as external actor and disrupt the status quo through playful and provocative gestures.

As two internationals, part of this multi-cultural collage, we were impressed. Through our work we researched whether the participatory approach towards the design and build practice of our cities could be applied as the missing link between the superdiverse environment of Brussels and its future urban development.

– the Universal Alphabet

https://spatialmirror.org/2016/06/29/_/

 

 

https://spatialmirror.org/

Students: Nicholas Jacobs, Teodora Stefanova, Nikoletta Daniil, Oanh Nguyen,

Marisa Borabo, Marika Piekarczyk, Matthias Verhoene, Jessica Alarcón

Teachers: Hanne Van Reusel in coordination with Dag Boutsen & Prof. Johan Verbeke

 

Part of the doctoral research of Hanne Van Reusel (KU Leuven) and Incubators of Public Spaces, a JPI Urban Europe research project. Funded through Innoviris

http://www.kuleuven.be/onderzoek/onderzoeksdatabank/project/3E15/3E150026.htm

https://incubators-of-public-spaces.com/

Designs Against the Homeless

cargocollective.com/massnahmen

Deterrent designs are, simply defined, tools used to control social behaviour and conduct in public or semi-public spaces. They are also referred to as unpleasant designs or defensive architecture.

More and more do we witness deterrent designs being implemented in our urban spaces to control social behaviour and conduct. While understanding that a certain level of control is needed to cohabitate harmoniously, how much control is too much control? Where do we find a balance between individual freedom on one end and excessive control on the other?

The never-ending exhibition “Designs against the Homeless” at Praterstern Vienna, Austria explores the varied, intentional strategies taken by city authorities to deter the homeless (usually away from commercial city centers). Using a diversity of form and materiality, the works pick apart conventional control methods such as police watch to a more indirect approach that considers urban furniture, light, sound and new technology. The designs that will be exhibited already exist at the station. These include public benches, bins, CCTV cameras and more.

Parts of the exhibition are the exhibition guide and tags of “art citations” on the deterrent designs that are “on display”. These mark the turning point where an ordinary everyday object become an art object. The citations directly confront the public and users of the deterrent designs to the topic leaving them surprised, bewildered and often curious.

These materials are accompanied also with a website and social media networks, where people could find more information and join sharing the examples on social networks under the hashtag #designsagainstthehomeless.

This project is an artistic response to deterrent designs. It attempts to raise awareness of these designs by decoding top-down processes in order to reread the city and to initiate a dialogue with the general public on the design of our urban environments, raising questions concerning the inclusion and exclusion of particular groups in society and design for comfort or discomfort.

The Hut of European Identity

What is Europe? Europe is real, but structurally open and indefinable. It is hardly a “thing”. There are things and persons “in” Europe that are not necessarily “of” Europe. Moreover, Europe certainly also exists for those who are not within it. When Europe’s political project is defined by the conformity to an imagined and unified cultural past – as something “we” inherited – we run the risk to leave out of our proposition the contested and – truth be told – the future.

Inside the Hut of European Identity, we suggest the possibility of European characters – and histories – that are not agreed upon, that are not based on the lowest common denominator of several national cultures, but on Europe’s inherent conflicts, on the idea of Europe as a contested political space – a project, in fact.

he Hut is an actual space: pieces of wood raised perpendicularly suggest the idea of columns, while horizontal beams laid upon them afford us the idea of entablatures. Fabrics and sheets salvaged from the demolished sector of the “Jungle” in Calais form and cover an incline that protects the interior from the sun and the rain. Placing all these different and diverging conflicts under one roof is not meant to finally resolve them by forcing them into a narrative of agreement and consensus, but rather the opposite: it is to suggest the possibility to live among multiple statements. The Hut concedes to the conflict between them in no way direct violence, but the violent feeling of many layers coming together, a strength of emotion and passion. It also sketches and tests the possibility of an archive where multiple readings would be possible across a material culture of conflict and other EU-related archaeological findings.

We have started by collecting material evidence. If the official material culture of the EU (again, think of banknotes, memorials, buildings, squares) is manufactured to manifest an “imperialistic” narrative (what Europe “should be”: transparent, continuous, technically democratic), what are then the objects, spaces, architectures that witness other possibilities, or that deny this narrative?  An archive of such materials would encourage oblique readings through the EU’s parallel and possible histories and identities.

The structure stayed empty for over one month, representing the identity of a ghostly polity, and then the first objects started to come in: multilingual banners from Athens, a Pan-African flag from Calais, squatters’ posters from a past European Summit in Amsterdam, flower crowns found in Schengen, weary construction materials from Calais.

What do we want to keep? What do we want to leave? Is our identity going to result from that?

Recup’Kitchen // an on-going exploration

Recup’Kitchen is a temporal architectural intervention that is created by engaged citizens to manifest their aspired, community-based values in the public space of Brussels. Although the kitchen is far from being finished, Recup’Kitchen is functioning. It is an open and multi-layered design concept. It has been collectively imagined, explored, designed, questioned, rethought, communicated, appropriated, funded, constructed, activated, loved, etcetera.  Its self-organized participatory design process is on-going.

 

Since spring 2015, when the initial idea for a kitchen at Josaphat arose, the design process has been through a continuative explorative journey.

More than a year ago three enthusiasts meet each other on the Josaphat site that is lying bare as the wasteland had recently been cleared. Wild imaginations and naïve aspirations are expressed in a spontaneous brainstorm.
// A take off for a collective voyage of discovery.

The basic design concept (a kitchen in a shipping container) gets further developed and articulated. It goes through various appropriations by other participants. The focus changes, its form becomes rearranged, …
// Wandering. To continue the road without a map. To linger. To meet strangers and go on together.

The Creativity Call for Brussels (May 2015) ‘Urban Food 2025’ triggered the first written conception of Recup’Kitchen. Short and long-term ambitions get articulated.
// Like a compass, it offers a sense of direction. To know what to head for, yet without guide.

The idea for a sustainable kitchen project gets appreciated. However, it appears to be tricky to actual realize the project. For a couple of months it gets abandoned. Once in while participants bring it up again and share their ideas.
// Take up a slow pace. To recuperate. To gaze and let go for a while as to find renewed energy.

November that year, a rearranged group of actors decided to take the leap and start a crowdfunding campaign. The collective goes to an intense process of conceptualization and communication of the idea.
// To climb a mountain. Intense collaboration. Perseverance. Fear. Shouting. Active involvement.

February 2016, over 150 people help to fund Recup’Kitchen. The collective dream can be realized.
// To reach the top. Gratitude. Empowerment. United as a group. To oversee the road to come.

The citizen collective starts to organize and plan how to continue. The process becomes more structured, new volunteers join, while others drop off. In April, the Kitchen opens with a big celebration to thank all those that contributed one way or another. The administrative organization shows to be more complicated.
// Not even halfway. Fueled up. Fatigue. To hit boundaries. To firmly go on.

Today the Recup’Kitchen team organizes minimum two events per month, with several additional events and many more request.
// The moments in-between to cherish. To see clear again. To find / create your own world.
// You would not have even been able to imagine it, if you wouldn’t have come from so far.

 

The Recup’Kitchen team: http://www.recupkitchen.be/nos-chefkoks/

and its on-line community: https://www.facebook.com/recupkitchen

 

Part of the doctoral research of Hanne Van Reusel (KU Leuven) and Incubators of Public Spaces, a JPI Urban Europe research project. Funded through Innoviris.

http://www.kuleuven.be/onderzoek/onderzoeksdatabank/project/3E15/3E150026.htm

https://incubators-of-public-spaces.com/

 

Parkeology: In Dust We Trust

Parkeology is a public art and webtv series directed by Kate Clark that excavates sites, stories and senses from urban parks. Featuring Balboa Park, in San Diego, California, Season I hosted five events exploring popular and obscure locations exposing the secret lives of artifacts, closeted LGBT histories, nudist colony remnants, and reimagined organ pavilions. True to our motto, “In Dust We Trust”, each project began by sifting through boxes, snooping in basements, and following up on another kind of dirt: gossip. Over time, these fragments grew into collaborative events and their respective scripts, scores, costumes, objects, and media. Parkeology partners with institutions and people to host time-based events chronicled by Channel Parkeology, directed by Ren Ebel, a webtv series, and ParkCast, a podcast series directed by Parker Bray.

Like many developing cities, San Diego’s algorithm of urban growth continues to accelerate. What only 167 years ago was both indigenous harvest territory and Mexican grazing land is now 1,400 acres of curated megafauna, miniature train systems, and freezers of artifacts. Along with whetting utopian tourist appetites, Balboa Park is also ground zero for many violences, social experiments, and struggles.

From an artists’ perspective, we think about this history of land use as a form of mark making. And no mark making is neutral. If you are a subject that somehow falls outside of this spectrum of normative design- there is a higher chance your physical imprint will have less staying power. Instead of hunting for clues that point to habitualized activity, we highlight and foster moments of experimentation, rupture, and even dischord- not as a historic recovery project- but to pose alternative ways of imagining how we treat the commons we have inherited and are producing. As parkeologists, our job is to create frameworks for people to relate to familiar spaces as if they are strange again. We scratch below the stucco, put our ear to it, and try to feel it from new angles.

There is much more to say, and hopefully the conversations continue!

Below is a brief description of each project, along with the corresponding Channel Parkeology episode links. To learn more, visit: www.parkeology.org

All Parkeology programming is free, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Project for Public Spaces, the San Diego Foundation, the California Arts Council, and The San Diego Art Institute.

I. Untracked: Beneath the Scenes at the SDMRM

For it’s inaugural event, Parkeology featured one of the most democratic spaces in San Diego: the San Diego Model Railroad Museum. Intimate tours were lead by an elected guide of the four model railroad clubs. Visitors experienced how each individually organized club builds and operates their landscapes and railways under a unique order of esthetics, scale, and culture.

Channel parkeology

II. Facing Artifacts: Casting and Collecting Profiles at the San Diego Museum of Man

In 1915, Museum of Man archivists worked with the Smithsonian to acquire life casts of members of Native American tribes, as well as many other racial “types.” These casts were exhibited to the public for the Panama California Exposition as an illustration of the progress of man. Parkeology revisited these difficult origins of physical anthropology, a science that is still in practice today. For one day, a life casting station was headquartered in the museum rotunda. Participants sat for 30 minutes with a lead Parkeologist and had their features transformed into a museum artifact.

Channel parkeology

III. Queen’s Circle: Cruising Oral Histories of Balboa Park

In collaboration with Lambda LGBT Archives edited sound interviews from those who participated in, surveilled, or managed gay cruising culture in Balboa Park became the fodder for an evening of storytelling. These recorded tales were played in parked cars in a popular cruising location: the “Fruit Loop.”

Channel parkeology

ParkCast Story

IV. The Naked Truth: The Rise and Fall of America’s Only Public Nudist Colony in Four Acts

For the 1935-36 California-Pacific International Exposition at Balboa Park, anyone could pay their 75 cents and spend as long as they wished watching up close fellow human beings hang out stark naked. Historians believe this was the only nudist park open to the casual public. Cultural journalist Welton Jones tracked down the elusive details of Zoro Garden and fashioned them into a day long pageant that came as close as possible to the “truth.”

Channel parkeology 

V. Organ for the Senses: Feeling, Seeing & Sounding the Spreckels Pipe Organ

Organ for the Senses was an experimental music concert that features newly commissioned electro-acoustic works for the organ. Each composition explored new ways to not only hear, but to feel and see the vibrations of the Spreckels Organ. Regional and nationally renowned contemporary musicians created works for the world’s largest outdoor pipe organ. Many compositions featured electronic elements, exploring how the organ functions as a massive analogue synthesizer. During the concert, live projected visualizations allowed visitors to “see” the sound- by live projecting a seismograph registering the physical vibrations of the audio.

Channel Parkeology episode forthcoming

SOLO DI FRONTE ALL’ORIZZONTALISMO

Public Art (Marble slab on pavement and website). Sassari, Italy. 2014

Sassari is a place I know very well. I’m not from there. I’m not even from the Sardinian island, but somehow thanks to the incongruences of life, I know this place better than all the places I have lived in.
Like many remote regions, Sardinia has a very particular and somewhat peculiar cultural effervescence, one which formed by its artists (students, commercially successful artists and their frustrated counterparts), its local institutions (art academies, museums, associations) and its  culturally specific aesthetic tendencies. This effervescence is dependent on random and sometimes divergent political strategies, a precarious and fragile market, as well as connections to the outside and  internal divides.
In July 2014 I was invited to Sassari to produce a piece for a public space. They actually invited 5 artists and let us each  choose one of several significant public spaces in the city for a site specific work. I made a good choice: Piazza Tola ( piazza tola sassari ). This “Piazza” is the veritable  center of Sassari’s decrepit “old town”. Early every morning it transforms into the site of the town’s bustling open air market ;  in the afternoon, locals flock to the piazza to seek shelter in the shade of the square’s adjacent buildings; in the evening Piazza Tola hosts all of Sassari’s urban fauna who lounge at its restaurants and wine bars;  later in the night, the square takes in the region’s students, drunks, and stray-dogs side by side, who hang out all night long on its marble tiles. This place is just perfect. At least for a good living.
Now, the thing is that I’m a kind of immaterial, conceptual artist; I am not at all convinced by most participatory dynamics and am very skeptical of institutional public art. You can understand perhaps that this position defined a rather embarrassing starting point for me to work in public space.
This was good though. From this inherent contradiction, and the inspiration provided by the square’s existing monument (a lonely figure in the centre of the Piazza sitting high on his chair and gazing beyond the town’s roof-tops towards the sea)  emerged a title : Solo di Fronte all’Orizzontalismo or, Alone Facing the Horizontalism. It came up immediately. This sentence was so stubborn that I had no choice but to work with it. It raised two questions that made up the heart of the entire project. The first question was regarding the kind of relevance public space could have for an artist of my genre. The second was about the actual stakes of this presumed horizontal relation between political institutions and a public targetted by commissioned public art.  That’s how I came up with the word Horizontalism –  the suffix -ism brings the notion of a romantic landscape into the (ideological and critical) sphere of political and social behaviors. Coming back to the title for a second,  the idea behind the work was to clearly state my position as an artist told to create some public art.
In terms of the art that was produced, the result was a a white marble slab engraved with  the title-statement  in black contrasting letters. The slab has the exact dimensions of the original stone that it replaced in the square floor. Its stark whiteness contrasts with the rest of the paved  market place.
Oh, yes, the title also simultaneously functions as a poetic statement and a web address : http://solodifronteallorizzontalismo.com . The website per se is a short texte. It’s short because I wanted it to respect the quick glance given by a normal passer-by. The language is also very friendly and light.
I chose to place my work (somewhat unconventionally) directly behind the Tola monument . As I mentioned earlier (but without referring to his name), Tola is the guy represented,  sitting in his chair looking beyond the roof line into the horizon towards sea. I decided to place the slab directly behind the statue in order to kindly push people to look in the direction of his gaze, and to suggest a lonely state of mind, or mood.
It was also important for me not to take up too much space or to create an imposing presence because I don’t usually produce objects and did not want to make something too catchy or obvious.  Even though I like catchy stuff.
I tried to create something that could provide people with a means to take away. Another space, and another time. In this sense I wanted to have a two dimensional sentence, that could work right in the moment and as a “take away formula” all at once. Everybody can choose to look or not at the slab. Choose to read its title as it is. Make a step further taking note of it and visit the linked website. For me this last step has the potential to shift the public space to a private sphere — with its peculiar tempo and a more critical distance.
Somehow this is a small monument. It was made in the aim of being a statement about art in public spaces. But instead of dealing with the typical issues of building experience sharing strategies, bringing language to the streets or getting beauty available for everybody,  this work takes the public experience back to the private. This is public intimacy.

—

DL_ 320 rue des palais 1000 BXL B _ www.the-david-liver.com _ 0032 472926467 / 0033 698119455

Public Dreaming – Public project and exhibition proposal

Social dreaming has existed for as long as people have shared accounts of their dreams with each other, and used them to make sense of the surrounding world. The origin of the concept of the social dream itself, however, may be attributed Gordon Lawrence. Lawrence pioneered the social dreaming matrix at The Tavistock Clinic in London in 1982, and subsequently published a series of texts on the practice of social dreaming. He (2010) defined social dreaming as a collective process that approaches dreaming from “a socio-centric viewpoint.” (p. 3) Within a social dreaming matrix, participants dream together, recount their dreams and then free-associate to the shared dream content. [1]

Since 1982, experiments in social dreaming have continued in different parts of the world (see the book The Creativity of Social Dreaming by Karnac), and also moved beyond the psychoanalytic domain, being taken up by artists, activists and educators. Gestare Art Collective’s Nap-Ins (2011, Vancouver) and Eva Frapiccini’s Dream’s Time Capsule (2012, Cairo) are two recent examples.

Public Dreaming is an interdisciplinary collaboration between psychotherapist and art historian, Leon Tan, and artist, Amanda Newall. Based on Lawrence’s pioneering work on social dreaming at the Tavistock, as well as on post-analytic theory (schizoanalysis and beyond), this project involves the construction of temporary Dream Clinics in the public spaces of the city. Members of the public and the Traders network are invited to sleep and dream collaboratively within these makeshift schizoanalytic clinics, and through conversations, engage in a situational or assemblage analysis.

We take seriously the idea that social life is, more often than not, ruled by forces and ideas of which we are barely, if at all, conscious. Social, and indeed, public dreaming, challenges the accepted wisdom that science and reason are the only ways to understand the world and our place in it. What happens when we momentarily disrupt, through sleep, the stranglehold of late capitalism’s instrumental logic on our lives? What other desires and ways of life are possible, when we decolonize the mind? Our wager is that social dreaming can function as an intuitive mode of collective thought that enlarges the space of the possible.

 

 

[1] Lawrence, W. G. (2010). The creativity of social dreaming. London: Karnac.

Politics Of Fear

According to statistics, most violent crime occurs in the privacy of homes, while the public space is much safer – but, paradoxically, that is where people are most afraid. Moreover, Europe faces an increasing fear of refugees and of the consequences of current migration movements. That is no less paradoxical, as there is no proven correlation between ethnicity and the number of criminal offences committed. On the contrary: according to the statistics, the crime rate is mostly equal or even lower in the case of immigrants. Crime rate in general can never be taken as a true evaluation of committed crime, meaning that we also have to consider tendencies of groups that are less likely to report a crime committed against them or other distorting facts, and that we however still stick to the academic consensus of using crime rates as a tool for representative comparison. Since events like the New Year’s Eve in Cologne or the incidents at Praterstern in Vienna, however, refugees are under general suspicion. So what is the source of the fear (of refugees) in public space?

Politics Of Fear is a project in which people are invited to participate in different artistic interventions, organized in various public locations in the city. In the first phase, the goal of the project is a survey and public visualization of fear. It is designed to encourage public debate on the subject of (constructed) fear and (feelings of) (un-)certainty in the public space in order to expose and (in exchange) deconstruct the mechanisms by which fear is generated.

What are people afraid of in public places and why? What is the contribution of current migratory movements and related media coverage, and what are the resulting fears of residents and refugees? Are the prevailing fears recognized and taken seriously? What are the effects of the main “fear spaces” on people’s (and especially women’s) behavior and participation in the public space? What are the causes of these fears, and how are fears fomented? (Role of the media, prejudices, etc.) What can help to resolve fears?

In order to encourage passersby to overcome possible inhibitions and express themselves on sensitive issues, different tactics were developed, in which (according to the approach), a certain material is being employed as a vehicle of communication (e.g. paper, fence, wood, water…). In order to visualize and demonstrate the situation as revealed in the project, people are first invited to collaborate in distributing the materials in selected locations, stacking them or laying them out in order to create a space, dedicated to people’s concerns. How much space do people and emotions have in a public place? Where and in what role do the city’s residents see themselves? How can feelings of fear be expressed with the materials provided? How much space should they be given? Where should they be placed and why?

In a second phase following the actions, strategies for the further utilization of the collected fears (in form of the used project materials) are developed in a participatory process with people of the city, aiming to find ways for implementations as temporary installations (e.g. as furniture, sculptures…). The focus in that phase is on the co-design process and on the creation of social spaces, that stimulate interpersonal interactions to facilitate the deconstruction of fears through the emergence of new points of contact.

Experiences and results collected in the course of the project will be published in form of a book and a library of fears (and strategies) in a third phase.

The pictures above show extracts of an action in TBA21 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, Vienna), where a fence (referring to newly built physical borders across Europe) was installed and used as a display for the collected fears and hopes of people concerning Europe. Throughout the intervention, passersby were invited to exchange “thoughts for fruits” to express emotions that, when outspoken or written down, could then be negotiated, contextualized and discussed. The outcomes, written on papers, were mounted into the fence to become exhibition, base for discourse and part of the the ongoing collection.