We are very pleased to be joining the symposium Aesthetics of Adaptation organised by Paola De Martin of ETH Zürich to discuss how to undo classism within design.
13 March 2019
15:00–17:00
Cabaret Voltaire
Spiegelgasse 1, 8001 Zürich
Mid-January with our friends at La Foresta – Accademia di Comunità, we’ve started out with a community drinks project. Over the next three years, with the support of Fondazione Caritro and a network of more than 18 local and international partners (Cuba Cola, Company Drinks and Square Root Soda), we’ll be making fizzy drinks as a means to explore our territory and connect people of different backgrounds.
Here is the project website (under construction) www.comunitafrizzante.it
After months of preparations and preliminary meetings, the first official co-design workshop of La Foresta – Accademia di Comunità is on its way. On October 13th, together with the Municipality of Rovereto, we are meeting our co-designers at the space in the station. The meeting is going to focus on getting to know each other and each project, whilst sharing a lunch. The co-design process will last up to January and is executed in collaboration with EURICSE (European Research Institute on Cooperative and Social Enterprises). At the end of it, we will present a project that outlines the collaborative management of the space and a community economies business plan.
Following the visit of students from the University of Applied Arts of Hamburg (HFBK) to Rovereto, it was our turn to head to Germany to participate in the on-going Projekt Bauhaus. For the occasion, we travelled to Berlin and together with the students from the class of Jesko Fezer, we organised a parade – Parading for the Commons – at the Floating University as part of the Datatopia Summer School. The whole project was supported/carried out with the support and on invitation of ARCH+.
Together with Giorgio, Martina and Irene from La Foresta in July we participated in the event “Architecture For Autonomy” organised by Escola Sem Muros at Esperienza Pepe in Venice.
Escola Sem Muros is a political pedagogical program of cultural and educational exchange aiming to generate critical and innovative practices on building collective spaces, based in Brazil.
That is, The Forest – community academy, a new project we are co-designing together with an open network of associations, informal groups and active citizens from Rovereto and surroundings, who are active in fields such as environmental education, digital literacy for migrants, permaculture, making & hacking, cultural animation, commons&commoning, community economies, anthropology, art and research.
Later in the year, the network will take over an unused building that is part of the train station of Rovereto in order to transform it into a “community academy”, whose contents, ways of operating, economies, activities and looks are being defined through a one-year co-design process.
The paper Speculating with Care: Learning from an Experimental Educational Program in the West Bank, reflects on our participation in the experimental study program Camps in Camps located in the West Bank. Bianca, who has written the text, explores “speculation with care” as a design method to envision possible scenarios for concrete future developments of a community. To do so she takes up the concepts of “matters of care”, inspired by the work of feminist philosopher María Puig de la Bellacasa. The paper was published as part of the special issue of Architectural Theory Review “Resist, Reclaim, Speculate” edited by Isabelle Doucet & Hélène Frichot, and copies can be downloaded here: https://t.co/Z7wWlSQ1hO. Enjoy reading it!
Get in touch if you would like to stay with us for a while. Have: studio space, risograph, power tools, spare room ;)
The third step of our involvement in Projekt Bauhaus is about to begin. Over the next ten days we will host a group of students from the Studio Experimentelles Design of the HFBK (Hamburg). We will explore commons, meet interesting people, build an installation for the upcoming Gay Pride in Trento, bake pizza and involve the students in our new collective project in Rovereto – La Foresta, accademia di comunità. Soon more.
Precarity Pilot is part of the exhibtion Lorem ipsum – Talking about Graphic Design at the Design Museum in Helsinki (FIN) that celebrates the 85th anniversary of the Finnish graphic desing association.
23 March to 27 May 2018
Helsinki
Thanks to the two curators Kiia Beilinson and Arja Karhumaa for inviting us into this space.
From the 25th March to the 2nd April, we’ll be in Rosarno (Calabria, southern Italy) to assemble Hospital(ity), the structure we helped build over the last few months in Rovereto, and which will soon be home to a literacy class, a clinic and a legal support point. The facility will be activated by different volunteer groups and organisations providing their services to the many exploited migrant fruitpickers living in the area.
We’ll go there together with 8 of the people who co-built the modules in Rovereto (Ablaye Mboup, Alex Trotta, Douglas Imasuem, Haruna Barr, Luca Modena, Samuel Funtim, Sowanou Komivi and Thierry Mbouli Obama) and with the architecture collective Area 527 (Francesca Bonadiman, Lionella Biancon and Michele Rossa), who designed the structure.
See more about the project on our Facebook profile (yeah! controversial, isn’t it?). Soon also a proper project section on this site about the whole thing.
On the 8th and 9th March, together with our friends Francisco Laranjo and Gaja Mežnaric Osole, we brought Precarity Pilot to Beyond Change in Basel. It was great sharing the space with Decolonising Design and
depatriarchise design!
From the 26th February to the 2nd March, as part of Circolo del Suolo, we hosted a workshop with 30 design students of the Masterstudio Design of the HGK Basel. The students were invited to explore the multispecies communities of the Vallagarina district through walks, observations, screenings, expert inputs, texts and discussions, and to produce an intervention, project proposal, commemorative object or reflection. Thank you everyone who contributed to these super interesting five days!
So here’s a major turning point in our practice. We’re building our first ever studio space, which means we won’t be working from our living rooms, bedrooms or university offices any more.
This probably used to be a storage space in the 200 year old house where we live and Fabio’s family used it as garage until recently. We insulated the floor with 6 cm thick high density rockwool slabs and are now making a floor out of pretty rough sawn fir timber boards. The space should be functional by the end of spring, and will host our MZ770 Risograph, so feel free to visit us and print something if you pass by.
The address is
Via Paissan 40/b
38060 Nomi (TN)
Italy
A bit late, here it is. We had the pleasure to design the new book edited by Doina Petrescu of aaa and Kim Trogal and published by Routledge.
Unfortunately, the design of the cover was freely reinterpreted by Routledge without notice before printing. Bravo! Luckily, the inner pages were not redesigned. Thank you. I must say I’m glad that they won’t work so much with external graphic designers any more.
Totally forgot to post about this. We’re thrilled to be part of this inspirational book project by Nina Paim, Corinne Gisel and Emilia Bergmark with two briefs for design students we proposed a few years back on different occasions. The first for a workshop at Architecture, Royal College of Art and the other one for a workshop at Graphic Design, UWE Bristol.
