Mercato dei frutti minori

Constructlab has been invited, inside Lecce Capital of Culture 2014, to come to Castiglione and communally with the people from the village, construct a roof and market furniture for the first edition of “Mercato dei frutti minori” taking place on the last weekend of August during “Notte Verde”. As we usually do and think is very important, arriving at the location we took some time to get to know and try to understand better the place and the people.

Working with the kids, we started changing the little school chairs by adding different size leg prosthesis assembling them in a parliament space, a drawn circle on the floor, for the lecture and debate program.

The main inspiration for the whole concept came from the “luminarie” culture that the area is famous for. It is light structures made out of wooden beams that are held in position by steel wire connected to the surroundings. Over the years, people from the villages around developed techniques to be able to set up and dismantle the huge temporary structures within short time.

As our intervention had to be realized within few days with little material and was meant to be a symbolic image of something that will be developed in future, we adopted this technique in order to make a built drawing of a future market roof in the air.

For the textile roof, people in the very lively and welcoming little village were asked to bring all their old discarded tablecloths and bed sheets and some sewing machines to connect them to long bands to be woven through the wire structure.

From the strong energy evolving during the process within the group, several side projects like all different shopping bags also made from the given textiles or decoration for the place came up.