H. Cenk  Dereli (TR): Herkes Icin Mimarlik (Architecture For All)

Time: Thursday 5 November 2015, 5 PM
Venue: Konstfack, Seminar room S2
LM Ericssons väg 14, Stockholm. T-bana: Telefonplan

[Video documentation of lecture below]

Occupy Gezi Architecture, cocumentation of temporary
structures by Herkes Icin Mimarlik

In the ninth lecture/presentation within the 2015 Organising Discourse Open Lectures series Istanbul based architect Hasan Cenk Dereli presents how an architecture organisation is formed to address present social problems in Turkey.

Herkes Icin Mimarlik (Architecture For All)

Herkes Icin Mimarlik (Architecture For All) is a non-profit and independent architecture organization based in Istanbul devoted to offering architectural solutions to social problems in today’s Turkey and beyond and promoting participatory design process in architecture education.

Herkes Icin Mimarlik was founded in 2011 and today it has 85 members from various disciplines. Since its foundation, Herkes İçin Mimarlık realizes its projects within a network formed mostly by students from design and architecture faculties in Turkey. With the idea to provide democratic and collaborative design processes between architects, urban designers, and citizens, the organization engages with the economic, political and social dynamics of the places where it works and aims to create sustainable communities through implementation of its designs.

As a multi-disciplinary platform Herkes İçin Mimarlık re-imagines the structure and scope of architectural processes. It focuses on creative ways to raise awareness about social challenges and mobilize communities in the pursuit of a social change. The organisation operates in both urban and rural contexts. With its projects, the organization leads volunteers in workshops that advocate environmentally responsible design as well as micro-economic development. www.herkesicinmimarlik.org

Occupy Gezi Architecture, photo documentation by Herkes Icin Mimarlik

H. Cenk Dereli is an Istanul based architect and a PhD Candidate in Architecure (Istanbul Technical University) working with urban politics and proactive design ideas. His personal creative productions define a practice that span from radio production, music, design research to events organization. He is also one of the members and project coordinators of probono architecture practice Herkes İçin Mimarlık Derneği (Architecture For All Association) and founder and manager of the design practice NOBON.

Download as PDF: Organising Discourse lecture 9

Video documentation of lecture 5 November 2015, Konstfack

Axel Wieder (DE/SE): RE-VISITING OPEN FORM

Time: Thursday 8 October 2015, 5 PM
Venue: Konstfack, Mandelgren (next to Svarta havet)
LM Ericssons väg 14, Stockholm. T-bana: Telefonplan

[Video documentation of lecture below]

Students in Oskar Hansen’s studio with the large number exercise, mid-1960s. Courtesy of Muzeum Akademii Sztuk Pięknych w Warszawie.

The eighth lecture within the 2015 Organising Discourse Open Lectures series will focus on the theory of Open Form, introduced by the Polish visionary architect, artist and urban theorist Oskar Hansen, and its role for experimental pedagogy and new relationships of users and architecture.

Re-visiting Open Form

Formulated initially at the XI. CIAM congress in Otterlo 1959, the theory of Open Form was a strong conceptual basis for all fields of Hansen’s activities. A former assistant of Pierre Jeanneret, a student of Fernard Léger and an active member of Team 10, he called for opening architecture for the activities of its users and turn it into a “perceptive background” exposing the events of everyday life. Oriented at participation, Open Form promoted the understanding of architecture as a tool that could be given to the users and easily adapted to their changing needs. Open Form was further developed by Hansen and a group of artists who studied in his studio at the Academy of Fine Art in Warsaw, among them Zofia Kulik, Przemysław Kwiek and Wiktor Gutt. His work became an important reference point for visual artists who treated their practice as a form of social experimentation.

Still from Game on Morel’s Hill (Group Action), 1971. Courtesy of KwieKulik archive

The presentation will discuss Hansen’s work and his legacy for contemporary discussions of pedagogies, space and participation. Some of the most remarkable outputs of Hansen and the artists he collaborated with include games and educational tools in which the roles of participants are actively negotiated. The documentation and discussion of processes was treated as a feature for analysis and knowledge production. It seems an interesting task to re-visit experiments with Open Form as a specific approach to participation and to deal with hierarchies in the production of space and knowledge. In a second step, we may ask about important areas for a discussion about access today, what are power relations of concern? What are areas that regulate access or represent hierarchies in a way that makes negotiation urgent?

Axel Wieder is a curator and writer living in Stockholm. He has been director of Index – the Swedish Contemporary Art Foundation since 2014, and was head of program and curator of exhibitions at Arnolfini Center of Contemporary Arts in Bristol. His work has frequently focused on the history and theory of exhibitions, architecture and social space, and issues of political representation. Recent exhibitions include “The Promise” at Arnolfini (2014), involving works of artists and offsite projects alongside urban planning and architectural models, and solo exhibitions with Joëlle Tuerlinckx, Willem de Rooij and Ian Hamilton Finlay. He also initiated exhibition and performance series on Maryanne Amacher, shown with DAAD, Berlin in 2012 and in 2014 at the Bonner Kunstverein. As artistic director of Künstlerhaus Stuttgart from 2007 to 2010, he developed an interdisciplinary program aimed at forging closer links between theoretical formats and exhibition presentations, repositioning the institution both regionally and internationally. Since 1990 he has taken part in numerous exhibitions in collaboration with Jesko Fezer, including the 3rd Berlin Biennale in 2004 and the 9th International Istanbul Biennial in 2005. In 1999, together with Jesko Fezer and Katja Reichard, he founded the bookstore Pro qm in Berlin, which is also a venue for experimental events in the field of art and urbanism. Among his many other projects, Wieder curated the exhibition “Now and Ten Years Ago” at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. He has also held lecturing posts at various universities and art academies, including the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste.

Download as PDF: Organising Discourse lecture 8

Video documentation of lecture 8 October 2015, Konstfack

Repair Society: Ringvägen – a temporary open research platform

Time: 1 – 3 October, 2015
Venue: FFAR (forum för arkitektur)
Ringvägen 141 Stockholm. T-bana: Skanstull

READ ABOUT The Repair Society: Ringvägen public programme HERE >

Repair Society: Ringvägen is a temporary open research platform and workshop about Repair It’s related to the on-going project ‘Repair Society’ and part of Organising Discourse. Between 30^th September and 3^rd October it will manifest itself as a public space for research, workshops, debates and presentations at FFAR (forum för arkitektur), Ringvägen 141 in Stockholm.

Repair Society: Ringvägen

“What would society look like if repair had a central role in our lives? In our thinking and acting?

Repair is not just about fixing things. The act of repair has cultural, social, economical effects and benefits. Repairing is about the constant struggle to make things work, from language, to things, to relations between people, to systems in society. In fact, repairing is a way to go forward; it bridges old and new, past and future, and could therefore be seen as a sensitive way of thinking about future forms of society.

The big question is: How can we give up the steadfast idea that innovation is connected to the “new and shiny?” Imagine a society built on improvisation, imperfection, resilience, differences, and care – a society based on reflexive action rather than rushing forward. Could that be a Repair Society? Embracing real life, with all its up and downs, the future imperfect, instead of the myth of the perfect. That’s how most people live their lives anyway; nothing nostalgic about that.”

Joanna van der Zanden, co-founder of Repair Society

Repair Society: Ringvägen is a temporary open research platform and workshop about Repair, situated at FFAR in the local neighbourhood around the eastern part of Ringvägen in central Stockholm. It will manifest itself over a few days and evenings with a programme of on going research activities, including public events with meetings, discussions and presentations (please see below for the programme an opening hours).

The workshop will inquiry and discuss the notion of Repair from the very local perspective and in various ways bring forward issues and ideas that can help shaping visions for alternative future development, locally and in society at large. This will involve obvious issues such as material aspects of everyday life but also around immaterial social structures.

Through the perspective of repair, how can we find an alternative approach to production, distribution and consumption of products and services? What about issues related to the urban development, planning, implementation of change and maintenance? How can this way of thinking affect the social fabric of this local neighbourhood? How can people, issues and skills connect and how can knowledge be shared?

 These questions intertwine material and social ecology and bring issues of how we can have an impact on society through local initiatives, self-organisation, participation, collectivism and counter measures.

Read more about Repair Society: http://www.repairsociety.net/
Dowload a invitation flyer from here:    English    Swedish

‘Repair Society: Ringvägen’ is organised by Organising Discourse with Amsterdam based curator and co-founder of ‘Repair Society’  Joanna van der Zanden. The workshop is developed with kind support by Iaspis and FFAR.

JOANNA VAN DER ZANDEN works as an independent curator and creative director on cross-disciplinary (social) design projects. She is particularly interested in the exploration of cultural formats where the public at large gets involved in the curatorial process of research, questioning and making. It is her view that contemporary cultural centres should – at the best – function as catalysts to stimulate critical and creative thinking and making and enlarge time and space for experimentation.

Mariana Pestana (PT/UK): ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE WORLDS

Time: Wednesday 27 May 2015, 5 PM
Venue: Konstfack, Mandelgren (next to Svarta havet)
LM Ericssons väg 14, Stockholm. T-bana: Telefonplan

‘The Universal Declaration of Urban Rights: Urban Parliament’, by Zuloark, ‘The Real
and Other Fictions’, 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale. Photo: Luke Hayes

In the sixth lecture within the 2015 Organising Discourse Open Lectures series, Portuguese architect and curator Mariana Pestana looks at how one can use reality and fiction in creating discursive spaces.

Alternative Possible Worlds

“This lecture borrows notions of reality and fiction from literature and translates them to the field of architecture in order to discuss the extent to which spatial design work can generate – even if for a moment in time – alternative, non-actual possible worlds. I will argue that, in depicting versions of the world as it could be, such work creates discursive platforms from where to re-evaluate the world as it is.

Architecture repeats itself through systems, programmes and typologies, which we have became accustomed to considering ‘normal’. Architect and critic Sam Jacob explains this in a stimulating way: as architecture becomes part of the landscape of the everyday, its quotidian banality concedes it reality . As he argues, architecture repeats materiality (bricks or concrete), structural systems (grids, combinations) but also typologies (prisons, city halls) and programmes (living room, bedroom). This constant repetition – besides legitimizing the conditions and ideologies that architecture embodies – is a form of making it seem ‘natural’. The problem that this ‘normality’ entails is, in my opinion, the fact that it perpetuates ideologies and postulates that determine the ways in which architecture is made and used. Disguised as ‘normal’, architecture materializes power structures, choreographs behaviours and relationships of authority that we often forget to question. The temporality that characterizes work operating across architectural design and curatorship opens opportunities to create spaces that break through the ‘normality’ of architecture (and with it the landscape of our everyday) and propose alternatives.

The lecture departs from the concept of ‘alternative possible worlds’ as articulated by the literary critic Marie-Laure Ryan, whose work was introduced to me by Sophia Psarra and analyses a set of relationships between the actual world (which we inhabit) and the non-actual possible worlds contained in texts of literary fiction. I will discuss whether work produced in the cross-disciplinary space between architectural design and curatorship can generate alternative, non-actual possible worlds and what role might users play in such fictional setting. The examples of work that will be presented were produced in the context of an exhibition that I curated for Close, Closer, 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, entitled The Real and Other Fictions. The subject of the exhibition followed the history of its site, a seventeenth-century palace in the centre of Lisbon, and so did the narrative sequence of the show, which was dictated by the spatial configuration of the building. Seven interventions were commissioned to architects, artists and designers, each located in a different room and each responding to a particular historical event that had taken place in the palace. Motivated by the political character of the uses that the palace had in the past, each of the interventions presented a fictional scenario, another possible world, alternative to that outside of the walls of the palace.”

The Nation Room: ‘Embassy of No Land’, by Paulo Moreira and Kiluanji Kia Henda,
‘The Real and Other Fictions’, 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale.
Photo: Carlos Azeredo Mesquita

Mariana Pestana is a Portuguese architect and curator. She has a degree in architecture from the University of Porto (FAUP) and a MA in Narrative Environments from Central Saint Martins College of Arts and Design, supported by a grant from Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation. Mariana lives and works in London, where she co-founded the collective The Decorators, with whom she developed curatorial projects and interventions in the public realm. She is doing a PhD at the Bartlett School of Architecture and is a lecturer at Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London. Mariana recently curated the exhibition ‘The Real and Other Fictions’ for ‘Close Closer’, 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale and integrated the Official Portuguese Representation at the Venice Architecture Biennale, curated by architect Pedro Campos Costa. She currently works as a curator in the Department of Architecture Design and Digital at the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Download as PDF: Organising Discourse lecture 6

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Otto von Busch (SE): REALDESIGN AND CIVIC CRAFTS

Time: Thursday 7 May 2015, 5 – 6 PM
Venue: Konstfack, Mandelgren (next to Svarta havet)
LM Ericssons väg 14, Stockholm. T-bana: Telefonplan

How can we contribute to crafting a more symmetric “cube” of justice?

The fifth Organising Discourse Open Lecture 2015 looks at how craft and design can function as platforms for action. Designer Otto von Busch speaks about how to possibly mobilise for justice.

Realdesign and Civic Crafts

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

Martin Luther King Jr, “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, 16 April 1963

In her book On Beauty and Being Just, art theories Elaine Scarry accounts for a discussion she had with economist Amartya Sen, where Sen evokes Aristotle’s’ idea of justice as a perfect cube; equal and proportionate in all directions. According to Scarry, we are drawn to symmetry intuitively, and we come to perceive injustices as an imbalance: we can feel when something is wrong, not only through reason, but through our senses.

In the world of realist politics, or what German chancellor Otto von Bismarck called Realpolitik, politics is based primarily on the execution of power, aiming at domination, rather than explicit ideological notions or moral or ethical premises. Realpolitik is a perspective and a mode of action in a world where man is regarded by nature to be hostile and cruel, rather than cooperative and kind, and where there can be no progress, no idealistic or peaceful future. Things will not be any better or more just, instead we are doomed to eternal asymmetry.

In such a world also the practice of design must be very different. If not actively contributing to asymmetry and injustice, a “realdesign” must still restrain some of its naïve idealism, yet without sacrificing any of design’s visionary imagination. It must start to see the world as it really is; yet still act towards what ought to be. But most crucially, the new future the designer just proposed must be safeguarded from the political forces that really is – those who seek to undermine justice through force and violence.

But how are we to build pragmatic platforms for action, and how can we use design and craft capabilities to mobilise for justice? How can we contribute to crafting a more symmetric “cube” of justice?

The lecture will not give the answer. But it will at least suggest some small ideas on how to try to form and materialize strategies for civic crafts in an asymmetric world of realdesign.

Otto von Busch (PhD) is professor in design at Konstfack, University College of Arts, Crafts and Design(Stockholm), and assistant professor at Parsons the New School for Design (New York). He has a background in arts, craft, design and theory and aims to seamlessly combine these fields into one critical fashion practice. In his research and practice he explores how design and craft can be reverse engineered, hacked and shared among many participants as a form of civic engagement, building community capabilities through collaborative craft and social activism.
www.selfpassage.org

Download as PDF: Organising Discourse lecture 5

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Emily Pethick (UK): THE SHOWROOM

Time: Thursday 16 April 2015, 6 – 7 PM
Venue: Konstnärsnämnden, Iaspis projektateljé
Maria Skolgata 83 Stockholm. T-bana: Mariatorget/Zinkensdamm

The Showroom, Penfold Street, London. Photo: Daniel Brooke

The fourth Organising Discourse Open Lecture 2015 looks the organization of a small-scale art space and how it operates. Emily Pethick, director of The Showroom in London, will talk about how it has developed over the recent years through various collaborations.

The Showroom

The Showroom is a space for contemporary art that is focused on a collaborative and process-driven approach to production, be that artwork, exhibitions, discussions, publications, knowledge and relationships. Its focus is on commissioning work that is generated through open and discursive means between artists, specialists, public and local stakeholders, connecting otherwise disparate fields and communities.

The talk will focus on how the organization developed over the last six years through the projects it has ben producing, many of which have involved different kinds of collaborations, particularly with local residents and groups, as well as how The Showroom works with both local and international networks.

THE SHOWROOM is a non-profit contemporary art space for emerging artistic practices and ideas, where collaboration and learning are integral to the production of new art.
Recent programme includes: Ciara Phillips’ exhibition Workshop (2010 –ongoing), 2013, was nominated for Turner Prize in 2014; Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s audio essay The Freedom of Speech Itself, 2012; Beatrice Gibson’s film The Tiger’s Mind, 2012; and The Otolith Group’s exhibition A Long Time Between Suns (2009) was nominated for The Turner Prize in 2010.

A central aspect of The Showroom’s work is a commitment to our neighbourhood, Church Street – one of the most deprived wards in the UK – where an on-going programme of projects, Communal Knowledge, was initiated in 2010 and is now led by Louise Shelley. CK enables close collaborations between artists, young people and community groups in the shaping of new projects that collectively explore issues at stake in the locality.

Emily Pethick has been the director of The Showroom, London, since 2008. From 2005-2008 she was the director of Casco, Office for Art, Design and Theory, in Utrecht, The Netherlands. From 2003-2004 she was curator at Cubitt, London. She has contributed to numerous catalogues and magazines, including Artforum, Frieze, Afterall, The Exhibitionist, and dot dot dot, and edited books, such as Casco Issues X: The Great Method (2007, with Peio Aguirre), Casco Issues XI: An Ambiguous Case (2008, with Marina Vishmidt and Tanja Widmann), Circular Facts (2011, with Mai Abu EIDahab and Binna Choi), pub. Sternberg Press), Cluster: Dialectionary (2014, with Binna Choi, Maria Lind and Natasa Petresin-Bachelez).
www.theshowroom.org

This lecture is presented in collaboration with Iaspis, The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme for Visual Artists

Download as PDF: Organising Discourse lecture 4

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Onkar Kular (UK): SNOWFLAKES

Time: Wednesday 25 March 2015, 4.30 – 5.30
Venue: Konstfack, Mandelgren (next to Svarta havet)
LM Ericssons väg 14, Stockholm. T-bana: Telefonplan

[Video documentation of lecture below]

‘Slow Motion Accidents Workshop: Risk Centre’, Arkitekturmuseet 2013

The third of 2015 Organising Discourse Open Lectures looks at the research and practice of the British designer Onkar Kular. The lecture is used as an opportunity to map out a landscape of research in relation to his current role as Stanley Picker Fellow for Design at Kingston University, UK.

Snowflakes

In the 2013 Errol Morris documentary, Unknown Known Donald Rumsfeld describes a method of communication, research and action based on the allegory of ‘snowflakes’. On his personal website The Rumsfeld Papers, Rumsfeld further defines the methodology by declaring that the snowflakes were:
“A system of communication with the employees of DoD (US Department of Defense), as I would initiate a topic with a short memo to the relevant person, who would in turn provide research, background, or a course of action as necessary. In the digital age it was much easier to keep the originals on file so I could track their progress. They quickly grew in number from mere flurries to a veritable blizzard. The term “snowflake” covers a range of communications, from notes to myself on topics I found interesting, to extended instructions to my associates, to simple requests for a haircut. There was no set template; some are several pages and some just a few words.”

Rumsfled states that when reviewed together the snowflakes not only provide an insight into the day-to-day activities of a US defense secretary but also offer a larger panoptical view of the role of ‘defense’ within the Bush government.

To coincide with his recent award as Stanley Picker Fellow of Design at Kingston University he will adopt the allegory of the ‘snowflakes’ as an opportunity of mapping his own research focus on institutional environments that have been designed and constructed for training. Kular will also use the opportunity to speculate on the potential pedagogic role of simulated training environments in relation to citizenship. The lecture will include anecdotes that act not only as supporting research but also as internal agents within a number of recent projects.

Onkar Kular is a London based designer and artist. His work investigates how contemporary design practice, its processes, methodologies and outputs, can be used as a medium to engage with and question the understanding of cultural and popular issues. His work uses a range of different media, appropriate to the particular research project to include new objects, films, events, performances and installations, and is disseminated internationally through exhibitions, workshops, lectures, film festivals and publications.

Recent exhibitions include Crafting Narrative a Crafts Council Touring Exhibition, guest curated by Kular the exhibition investigated the role of narrative and narrative structures within the design and production of artifacts. In May 2014, he designed and curated The Citizens Archive of Pakistan together with Sanam Maher, bringing together a variety of personal stories to critically revisit the history of the Partition today. Other notable exhibitions include Risk Centre, at Arkitekturmuseet in Stockholm on constructed environments used for risk and safety education and I Cling To Virtue, with Noam Toran and Keith R. Jones, recently exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Antwerp which presented a mixed-media collection of objects, narrative texts and videos that reveal the intricate trajectories of the Lövy Singh clan, a fictional East London family of mixed descent.

Onkar Kular is currently a Stanley Picker Fellow in Design. His project for the fellowship extends ongoing research and ideas around constructing simulated environments for education and training.
www.onkarkular.com

Download as PDF: Organising Discourse lecture 3

Video documentation of lecture 25 March 2015, Konstfack

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Can Altay (TR): INHABITATION: SETTINGS AND COLLECTIVITIES

Time: Wednesday 4 March 2015, 5 – 6 PM
Venue: Konstfack, Mandelgren (next to Svarta havet)
LM Ericssons väg 14, Stockholm. T-bana: Telefonplan
Lecture in English

‘PARK: bir ihtimal’, 2010. Istanbul. Photo: Laleper Aytek.

The second 2015 Organising Discourse Open Lecture looks at developing space and situations. Based on the idea of “Setting a setting” the Istanbul based artist Can Altay will present and discuss around different examples developed in various contexts, from the art space exhibitions and projects to social and urban interventions.

Inhabitation: Settings And Collectivities

A “setting” is a space or situation of gathering for ideas and discussions to take place and foster. “Setting a setting” involves the conception and actualization of spaces that instigate, host, and stage a certain production. This “production” usually involves collaboration: some form of working together that transforms the “work” of all the collaborators. The early settings that I had developed, reflected on performative and architectural means, primarily within spaces of art. Later settings – such as The Church Street Partners’ Gazette and PARK: bir ihtimal – began in the realm of art too, as exhibitions and collective projects, but ventured into direct social and urban intervention / contributions in a realm that involves less mediated, more confrontational, wider publics. It is a situation, or condition, that also shifts the centrality of the setting, since it is now located in a more severe, factual, and crowded network of things and operations. These settings ask for the emergence of a collectivity, in the city.

This lecture at Konstfack will introduce a number of settings that I was able to develop in various contexts, and share insight on ongoing projects, where I am trying to tackle questions of inhabitation and territoriality.

Can Altay is an artist and Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Architecture at Istanbul Bilgi University. He investigates the functions, meaning, organisation and reconfigurations of public space. His ‘settings’ provide critical reflection on urban phenomena and artistic activity. His work traverses sculpture, photography and installation, and is staged and manifested through the spaces, exhibitions and publications he produces.

Altay has had solo exhibitions at Arcade, London (2012), Casco, Utrecht (2011), The Showroom, London (2010), Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin (2008), Sala Rekalde, Bilbao (2006) and Spike Island, Bristol (2007). His work has been included in Biennials of Istanbul, Havana, Busan, Gwangju, Marrakech, Taipei; and in museums and galleries such as the Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven), ZKM (Karlsruhe), Artists Space (New York), and SALT (Istanbul). His public projects include: Inner Space Station (NewYork, 2013); Distributed (London, 2012); The Church Street Partners’ Gazette (London, 2010 13) and PARK: bir ihtimal (Istanbul, 2010). Altay is the editor of Ahali: an anthology for setting a setting, 2013 published by Bedford Press, AA Publications, London. His work has been published in periodicals such as Frieze, AD (Architectural Design), Journal of Architectural Education, and Sanat Dunyamiz.

Altay holds a PhD in Art, Design and Architecture from Bilkent University, Ankara. He studied Critical Studies at the Malmö Art Academy and Lund University, and Interior Architecture and Environmental Design (BFA and MFA) at Bilkent University. He is currently Head of the Department of Industrial Product Design at Istanbul Bilgi University.

Download as PDF: Organising Discourse lecture 2

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SILVIA FRANCESCHINI (IT)  GLOBAL TOOLS 1973-1975: When Education will
coincide with Life

Time: Thursday 12 February 2015, 5 – 6 PM
Venue: Konstfack, Mandelgren (next to Svarta havet)
LM Ericssons väg 14, Stockholm. T-bana: Telefonplan

Global Tools workshop at Sambuca Val di Pesa (Firenze), 1-2 November 1974
Courtesy Archive U. La Pietra-A. Raffo

The first 2015 Organising Discourse Open Lecture explores approaches to research and education as forms of discursive platforms. Here through the historical example of how Global Tools was developed as an experimental art and design counterschool in the early 1970’s Italy.

GLOBAL TOOLS 1973-1975: When Education will coincide with Life

Global Tools was a multidisciplinary experimental program of design education founded in 1973 in Italy by members of the Italian Radical Architecture – including Ettore Sottsass Jr., Superstudio, Gianni Pettena and Andrea Branzi among others – in conversation with exponents from Arte Povera and Conceptual Art, such as Germano Celant, Luciano Fabro, Giuseppe Chiari, Franco Vaccari and Davide Mosconi, and hiddenly linked with the avant-garde movements in Europe and North America.

It was conceived as a diffuse system of laboratories (firstly in Florence, Milan and Naples) promoting the “[…] study and use of natural materials and their behavioural characteristics” with the support of media (namely the magazine Casabella) and aimed to establish an alternative relation with the Italian Industry.

The movement developed in the complex socio-political and cultural Italian context of the early 1970s, oscillating between the vivid intellectual environment of operaist theories and the critical political moment of terrorism known as “Anni di piombo” (Years of Lead).

The idea underpinning this counterschool was to conjugate the most utopian and intransigent aspirations of Radical Architecture with alternative life solutions inspired by Stewart Brand’s The Whole Earth Catalog, in order to invent new operational “tools” for the upcoming era of globalization. Global Tools initiators invested in building a program of research and education outside the institutional frame of university and a notion of industrial design never renewed, with the goal to free individual creativity from cultural superstructures that hindered or slowed its expressive capacity. But, in 1976, Global Tools had already entered a new period in which the avant-garde would be a mass phenomenon, laying the foundations for a conceptual and transgressive design destined to outlive the school itself.

The lecture of Silvia Franceschini GLOBAL TOOLS 1973-1975: When Education will coincide with Life anticipates the homonymous upcoming e-publication with SALT Istanbul (March 2015) co-curated together with Valerio Borgonuovo.

Silvia Franceschini is a curator and researcher. She is currently a PhD candidate in design and art theory at the Politecnico di Milano, Milan. Her recent curatorial projects include: Sources Go Dark (Center for Contemporary Art FUTURA, Prague, 2015); Global Tools. 1973-1975: Towards an Ecology Of Design (SALT, Istanbul, 2014); The Way of Enthusiasts (V-A-C Foundation at La Biennale di Venezia – Architettura, Parallel Program, Venice, 2012); Mazama Recidency Program (Mazama, Washington, USA, 2011). She has previously worked as assistant curator for the Archive for Spatial Aesthetic and Praxis ASAP (Berlin, 2011) and at the Design Department of the Centre Pompidou (Paris, 2009). Her articles and interviews have appeared in Afterall, Alfabeta, Domus, Abitare. She has lectured at SALT in Istanbul, Cittadellarte Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow and The Architecture and Urbanism College of University of São Paulo among others. Silvia Franceschini is a member of the curatorial team of the upcoming Second Kyiv International Biennale of Contemporary Art 2015 leaded by Georg Schöllhammer and Hedwig Saxenhuber. She holds an MA from Politecnico di Milano and a post-graduate degree from the Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design in Moscow.

Download as PDF: Organising Discourse lecture 1

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