Active Scenography

A museum, a storage for our culture, is not only a space, it is also an image showing how we express and how we read at present. A museum is the room, where an exhibition takes place. It is also already in the pocket of someone who strives out for an adventure to once be documented in the museum’s facilities. It is a retreat from reality, asking people, through the freedom provided within it, to create meaning and use. To avoid imprecise predictions, a scenographic representation helps us to visualise the future by outlining an alleged essence of the present. By representing a collective effort, the story of what can collectively be achieved becomes a possible reading of the spirit of the present. But also failure, evolution, dead ends and searches are exhibited. The museum becomes a social power plant when visitors, artists, curators and employees come together to form an agency both to serve multiple purposes and different values. Not only within this idea of a museum but also regarding our practice, it feels necessary to create a way in order that such representation and the activity happen simultaneously with their own independently useful outcome. We even imagine that the museum can be a starting point, not the after-life.

Agora-Friendly

Literally meaning ‘gathering place’, the agora is placed in the heart of the community. When sensing a genuine need for debate and discussion in a particular place, the agora becomes a catalyst for a dense situation of exchange, be it lore, passion or conflict. In our current individualistic society, there is need for the promotion and reconfiguration of public life and this can be achieved in tangible places such as the agora. A crucial space for the practice of democracy as such, it is usually constructed in a circular shape, which demonstrates a non-hierarchical way of organizing space. Architecture, as the practice of organizing space, can influence the organization of society. Through its temporality it is both hunting and awakening the desire to communicate on a playing field level. The gesture of starting a dialogue in an ephemeral space can become a ritual that can afterwards turn into a habit, settling and reinforcing the physical agora by its presence or moving elsewhere, where it can be practised more permanently.

Applied Academics

Putting the improbable over lessons in statistics, we ask ourselves how to keep learning. At the interface of academic research and applied experimentation we want to cultivate curiosity and a desire to learn with all our senses, using all our skills. We do not act against the academic, but we want to extend the notion of academic learning and include empirical research; to learn in search for experiences, through experiences. For this, the space is variable and can be outside or inside, central or remote. All we need is to find a generous context to claim a common ground. Beware! When we consider the priceless learning outcome, completely new economic structures can also be imagined. We collaborate with institutions and with those who set out to challenge them. We try to acquire knowledge, to confront it and to apply it, whether it comes from books, hands or secret caves. Therefore we use many formats, be it dinner lectures, regular lessons, intense hours, hands-on workshops, talking heads, morning exercises or incognito encounters...

Claimed Utopia

In order to claim a utopia, we need a kitchen, toilet and wifi. Levi Strauss’s contribution to anthropology was that the discovery of cooking changed humans from primitive to cultured beings. From this perspective, the kitchen is also the place where culture was born and can be reborn under sizzling sounds and appetizing smells. What has to be examined around the table is not only what and with whom we want to eat, but we also have to answer the what and with whom regarding questions of learning, building, celebrating and sharing. Even more important than the what becomes the how. Claimed utopias cannot be summaerized in one sentence nor in a handful of pictures. They are debated and experienced, never fit into 15-minutes talks and confuse the audience. They are deeply intertwined with a place and a community and thus require a high desire of presence and residence (which makes the wifi necessary for the pursuit of our ordinary lives). In a way they function like our own artist residencies or research base. They are the sum of many personal quests and can produce or be founded upon infrastructures such as libraries, active citizen associations, bread ovens, unused cultural establishments, the desire to found a community or city or a public garden.

Diffused Structures

We experiment building sites as places of knowledge exchange and conviviality. In a first step we conceive places of production and furnish the tools and methods to produce a construction site situation that understands and respects the local and concrete needs and has the capacity to adapt throughout the process to unexpected turns. We live in situ and put in place the infrastructures that assure the high quality of the space, the food, the exchange and everything that is needed to produce something worthwhile. Construction is the first step of inhabitation. Or, cohabitation. The construction site is a strategic position from which we can initially observe the local reality and initiate a situation of encounter to tame and be tamed by the local communities and later hopefully be incorporated. Often, our spatial interventions become a support structure, where different projects and initiatives can be developed. We want to create a visible space, qualified to stimulate a new sociality, but at the same time, we want to keep its potential open and not predefine its outcome. Members of the collective offer a unique social capital to the local economy. Apart from creative energy and ideas, the collective is gifted with practical hands-on skills and tools that can be very useful to the community such as woodworking, printing press, graphic design, mediation, metal-working and baking.

EXYZT

For (Utile) Play

In order to address the inhabitants of a city, urbanistic discourse has to convey a passion, satisfied by the joy of an object, architecture or an intervention. This can happen through intriguing images, unexpected occurrences, thrilling tales or playable constructions. It can also be achieved by transforming the streets of our cities into spaces for dealing with the concerns of everybody. Through making and being present, we encounter who we would not cross otherwise. We imagine the point of contact, furnish carriers of imagination, trigger topics and tell stories to tackle themes that seem relevant for the city and everyday life in it.

Participatory Construction

How do you access public space? In our projects this is a question that comes back often. And how does the public access our space? We conquer a space in order to then put it on the table for negotiation. Often the spaces we act on are changing their status with our intervention: from derelicted to lively, from closed to open, from forgotten to new attraction, we wonder what is the best way to communicate to visitors the transformation of a place, which did not use to welcome the public. At the same time, when you stress a little what public use can possibly mean, how can you find a balance between protecting and opening up a space? We want to tickle people’s imagination and show that public use can be more engaging, and even include production. That public use can be more versatile, and sometimes spark long-term devotion. That public space can be more intimate, and even get a personal touch. A public space is not simply a decorative park, where you are not allowed to leave any trace or change anything, but a place where production of goods and ideas can be facilitated and were democracy should be practised.

Shelter

Construction is the first step of inhabitation. Or, cohabitation. In many of the projects, Constructlab and its expanded family inhabits the site both during construction and unfolding of the project. Therefore, the concept of the project stretches in order to includes the creation of the conditions we need to inhabit the site. In a way, we create our own artist residency and research base in the midst of the building site. The construction site is a strategic position from which we can initially observe the local reality, in order to be later integrated in.

Space Exploration

As researchers and explorers we discover new territories, we make expeditions to the unknown familiar, where we are laymen and alien. We find, then copy or interpret traditions, customs and cultural practices; we laugh at them and are laughed at. The otherness is inspiring, be it in another country or around the corner. And it brings new questions. New challenges demand ever-new prototypes. We install a laboratory in situ to test and experiment. Sometimes we become entangled and close, or we stay at a healthy distance to observe and put at question the ways things are done. As pirate-pioneers and inventors, we want find treasures and do the unseen.