On the 27th February, at 1pm, Bianca and some more people from Department 21 will be guests of the exhibition Into the Fold , organised by Camberwell Press .

Camberwell Press seeks to create and ideal and interactive studio within a public space for two and half weeks. The exhibition will culminate in a publication formed from material generated with collaborators via a series of talks, workshops, design & publishing projects.

Next Friday, Bianca will be talking about Designing Economic Cultures at public works’ studio, during one of their beloved Friday Sessions . The evening, titled “Sunday soup and other ways to feed culture”, is organised and curated by Matilde Martinetti, who is currently collaborating with public works.

Friday 24 February, 7pm
public works studio
1-5 Vyner Street
London E2

An interview with us by Brooklyn-based curator Yulia Tikhonova was published on the website of the Institute for Culture in the Service of Community Sustainability , a think tank dedicated to developing cultural strategies for the 21st Century.

Tomorrow Bianca and Caterina Giuliani will give a talk at the Designing and Transforming Capitalism conference at Aarhus University (DK) titled “Construction site for non-affirmative practice: building collective support structures for critically-engaged designers”.

Recently we were invited by Kathrin Böhm (myvillages.org / public works ) to participate in a three day (6-8 January 2012) workshop in Brezoi (Romania), as part of the project ECO-Nomadic School (ENS).

ENS is based on a partnership between Atelier d’architecture autogérée (AAA), AGENCY , myvillages.org and Fundatia Communitara de Dezvoltare Local (FCDL), and it is supported by the European network RHYZOM , in which all these partners are involved. The project is a “nomadic and temporary school for mutual learning and teaching of eco-civic practices in different regions of Europe”.

Amongst other modalities, the school is activated through a series of four civic seminars, each organised by one of the partner institutions, which involve local residents and organisations. In a few words, this part of ENS could be described as a loosely organised group of practitioners from different fields – ranging from art to architecture to gardening – who gather periodically in order to research and discuss on different situations and case-studies. During these gatherings ideas for site-specific projects and initiatives are generated that draw on the diverse experiences the participants bring into the group.

The gathering we participated in took place in Brezoi, a post-industrial Romanian town of 7.000 inhabitants located in the Carpathian Mountains, about three hours drive from Bucharest. The meeting was hosted by FCDL, the Community Foundation for Local Development from Brezoi, which started operating in 1996 in order to counteract the negative effects produced by the closure of the local sawmill in 1995, which represented the economic base of the town by employing thousands of people. In the early 90ies, 80% of the population of Brezoi was officially unemployed. Today there exist a number of informal economies in the area and every family has at least one of its members working abroad.

What is particular about Brezoi is that “self-sustainability was the traditional way of living in the rural community: from traditional building with local materials to providing food locally. From grass mowing and animals keeping to procurement of materials and building of houses, the work used to be done in common. During the last 50 years, all these practices/activities started to fade away, being replaced by easier, more efficient (or not) and globally accepted ways of living. Only few traditional practices have resisted, including the obste, which are forms of collective managing of land, pastures and forests.”

FCDL, together with other local organisations and institutions, believes that the social and economic decline Brezoi experiences could be brought to a halt be the reviving of local agriculture and pastoral economy in combination with the development of small-scale alternative tourism centred around local traditions.

The three-day workshop represented a first step in this direction. It mainly revolved around the sharing and discussing of relevant personal experiences by the participants, doing walks around the area, learning about local history and pastoral economy as well as collecting first ideas that will lead to the second, more hands-on phase of the workshop in summer 2012.

Central to the three days were the case studies of the so-called odaia. The term odaia indicates a micro-system made of a piece of land in the mountains (about three hectares), a one room house built on it, a ‘water hole’ fed by a nearby spring that serves several odaia, the plants that are cultivated on the land (for example fruit trees, potatoes, etc.) and the animals (mainly sheep) that are brought to the odaia by the shepherds in summer, the season during which the odaia are mostly used. The odaia in the mountains around Brezoi – there are about 900 of them – are family-owned and they are several hundred years old. In the present, most of them are run-down and only a few are still in use.

The idea from the side of FCDL would be to start working with a few of these still working odaia located 8 to 10 Km from Brezoi and to imagine possible future developments for them. For this reason, the last day of the workshop was dedicated to sketching out first ideas of how the pastoral economy of these places could be revived – potentially being integrated with a soft and culturally involved tourism. The group’s ideas where especially concerned with how this process of revival could benefit the whole community of Brezoi and not only a restricted number of odaia-owners. Hence, the workshop participants considered what kind of communication could be thought of to go with this endeavour, in order to keep the project open and accessible for everyone in the local community.

In summer 2012 a summer camp will take place in Brezoi in order to start working on the first concrete steps towards the revival of a sustainable local economy.

Thanks to Alex, Erini and Sam for the beautiful photos

We’re pleased to announce that the website for Designing Economic Cultures is finally live and growing.

www.designingeconomiccultures.net

Giorgio Camuffo invited the Construction site for non-affirmative practice to give a talk tomorrow evening at the Faculty of Design and Art of the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano as part of the series Werkstattgespräche.

Poster by Stefano Capodieci / illustration inspired by J.K. Gibson-Graham

We were totally surprised and pleased this morning, when we got our copy of Next Nature , a book edited by Koert Van Mensvoort and Hendrik-Jan Grievink, in which Brave New Winter is featured on two double spreads together with a ton of essays and visual contributions. Thanks.

On the 13th December at 4pm we’ll give a short lecture with the people from the Construction site for non-affirmative practice at Stefano Maffei’s class Factory@everywhere at Politecnico di Milano .

A small visual contribution to the project Jederland – Symbolic Actions for Our Present , we have been involved with over the past year, and which has now come to an end.

Not translated. See Italian version.

From the 26th to the 29th September and from the 17th to the 20th October at Careof, Fabbrica del Vapore, Milano.

In this series of encounters, run by the economic researcher Hervé Baron, we intend to propose an argument that is relatively unknown to the Italian public: the issue of the social imaginary. The argumentation will range from the general to the particular: after an initial introduction to the topic, we will see why the studies of the imaginary have developed mostly in France around Cornelius Castoriadis. We will then confront the approach of Castoriadis with that of Marx in order to investigate possible complementarities. These theoretical excursions will be followed by practical examples of the application of the concept of the imaginary to our society. These examples will focus on money and the image as commodity.

The last three encounters will be dedicated to a reading laboratory in which we will analyse texts relating to the arguments treated beforehand.

The aim of this series is not to propose ready solutions, but to stimulate questions and doubts in the interlocutors. Bibliographical references will be provided in order for everyone to keep on walking with their own legs, once the series comes to its end.

26th September 2011, 4pm
What is the imaginary?

27th September 2011, 4pm
Cornelius Castoriadis and the imaginary

28 September 2011, 4pm
Castoriadis and Marx

29 September 2011, 4pm
A practical analysis: money

17th October, 4pm
A practical analysis: the image as commodity

18th October, 4pm
Reading laboratory
The Religion of Capital by Paul Lafargue (in an Italian translation by Hervé Baron)

19 October, 4pm
Reading laborato
The Religion of Capital by Paul Lafargue (in an Italian translation by Hervé Baron)

20 October, 4pm
Reading laboratory
L’uomo sulla luna (The Man of the Moon) by Maurizio Grossi

Gli incontri si terrano nella galleria Careof alla Fabbrica del Vapore a Milano. Via Procaccini, 4.

Our next residency is about to start. Until the 28th October we will be hosted by the organisation for contemporary art Careof at the Fabbrica del Vapore in Milan. We’ll share the Construction site for non-affirmative practice with six recent graduates from Italian design schools: Isacco Chiaf, Stefano Capodieci , Caterina Giuliani , Manuel Guadagnini, one member of the collective Quisai and Giovanna Zanghellini.

After our 5 months long residency at A-I-R Laboratory in Warsaw, we’re back in Italy. Soon we will post more material about Constructive Dismantling, the main project we developed in Poland.

An interview with us by Paulina Jeziorek was published in issue number 69 of “notes.na.6.tygodni” (6-week notebook), a non-profit cultural magazine published by Bec Zmiana Foundation (Warsaw).

We have been invited by Careof , an organisation for contemporary art based in Milan at the Fabbrica del Vapore, to take part in the FDV Residency Program for creatives.

In September and October 2011, we will transform the exhibition space at Careof into a studio/incubator for non-affirmative practice in design. We invite five recent graduates from Italian design schools, who in their graduation project have intended to foster debate on a specific socially, politically or environmentally relevant issue, to share for two months the material and social resources of our residency. Thus inserting a buffer between the educational and professional world by creating a space where to extend and deepen the path of research and experimentation people have undertaken during their studies and in particular during their thesis work.

The project, Cantiere per pratiche non-affermative (Construction site for non-affirmative practice), is part of our current research on the relationship between design, precarity and critical practice, which has been ongoing since the beginning of 2011 within the framework of a Ph.D. at the Design Department of Goldsmiths College in London. The underlying question of the research project is: what organisational structures and strategies enable designers to contribute with their work to a more equal, just and de-alienated society?

Apart from coordinating the unusual workspace, we will contribute to the project by organising a series of encounters with designers and other experts around the production dynamics of the capitalist economy.

The invited designers will be welcome to use the gallery/studio at Careof as a multi-functional workspace. This means that they will be able to:

- Have a fixed workspace in the gallery from the 5th September to the 29th October (the space will be open Monday to Friday from 11am to 7pm)
- Organise and participate in research-oriented seminars, talks and workshops related to their own or others’ projects
- Exhibit their works and use the gallery to involve and engage with the public
- Benefit from working closely to practitioners from various disciplines who have similar interests

The initiative is addressed to designers who graduated in 2009, 2010 and 2011.

Designers wanting to participate should send their graduation project (5 images and an abstract of max. 500 words) together with a motivation letter to bravenewalps [at] gmail [dot] com by the 31st July 2011. The names of the five participants will be published by the 10th August 2011.