Performative Workshops

Relational and Social Design through Architecture  

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Modernism accustomed us to the pleasure of thinking that we can project and programme anything: lives, relations, jobs, human beings, countries, along with the spaces in which all those take place. Beside this tense game of projecting and programming, do we still know how the space is designing us? Beyond focusing on abstract thinking, visual appeal and productivity, do we know what behaviours, personal, social and political, are generated by a certain change of an angle or colour or texture or form? In such a century of multiple crises like ours, that will either be ecological or not at all, how can we avoid those “énormes natures mortes architecturales", useless and dead spaces with which no one happily interact? This series of workshops offer a performative toolkit made of recent researches on the design in biology & evolutionary dynamics, relational & practical logic, contemporary art and dance/theatre improvisation approaches created especially for architects. Their goal is to train three main ingredients of responsibility toward the build space:

1. Awareness of multiple relational contexts, questioning how a certain architectural or urban design will relate with its future inhabitants, in even the smallest and unexpected details. What dynamics it blocks or allows? We see architecture as an art of long durations. Sooner or later all the seeds put into a project will emerge from it and if, left unknown from the beginning, they will sabotage in time the initial intentions.

2. Seeing architecture as an extended body in order to embrace a non-mechanical, biological paradigm for architectural and urbanistic thinking, learning from nature how we can create alive spaces. The performative training exercises will enhance a sense of what`s superfluous and what`s necessary, what is healthy and what is hostile to life.

3. Attention to and responsibility for the power relations expressed and encouraged by architects` work. ”When responsibility is in charge obedience disappears”, was one of Milgram`s conclusions related to his experiment on obedience. How can we generate polyphonic, collaborative architectures that may transform our cities in huge fitness apparatuses for democratic, non-authoritarian, non-discriminatory, responsible social and political relations?

 

 

 

The Alive Space

performing relational logic & relational aesthetics with architects

 

How would you feel to be a member of a society in which people are emotionally moved by the waving of an ellipse or the cheerful or sad air of an oblique line? What are the differences between moving in a straight line and moving along a pattern of nature, usually curved or spiral; when do we get tired faster, when do we have more force and when do we break more easily? How is it to live your space as a score of emotions or as a dream that continually provokes you to change your habits of movement and perception? How is my personal space with its vital areas of protection, growth, closure-opening? How is your personal space? And how harmoniously or dissonant does the public space relate to our private spaces?If we think that architects create the scenography of both our private and public lives, then the relationship between the alive space, performative arts and architecture enters into a fertile and interesting light. I refer to scenography as a frame / installation that generates certain behaviors through the rhythm and pace of the vertical or horizontal paths, through the effects of openings and closures on the emotional comfort and intelligence of the inhabitants, or through the power relations or on the contrary, of collaboration, that they generate and so on. Contemporary performative arts usually have an element of research of human behavior in certain relational contexts. It's about living, concrete, practical, embodied relational contexts, not just relations that are happening in our minds: for example, the relationship of a human being with a color like Yves Klein's blue or with a state of silence - John Cage 4,33, or the freedom of establishing your own breathing length without being conducted (Witold Lutoslawski's  aleatoric method) or with the degree of uneasiness of an oblique line depending on its distance from the ground, or the impossibility of free choice etc. These performative experiments are seemingly minor. But all these small details, small ingredients and fine dosages can lead to an embodied understanding of the relationship that is established between humans and the multiplicity of small variables surrounding them. And for architects, it can make the difference between being aware or not of how the architectural or urban design will communicate with its future inhabitants. In essence, these very small details mark the difference between creating architectures sabotaged by their own future, that people ignore or even avoid, and creating living spaces that integrate organically, harmoniously into their own future.Architectural structures are first mind structures. Both need stretching and training in multiple logical and imaginative possibilities: from paradoxes & modal & relational logic exercises, to those mind structures perceived with our ears in contemporary music or to those intelligent, alive structures of the natural world with their complex functionalities and dynamics. So this workshop is an invitation to allow our minds and bodies to leave the reductionist-abstract spaces that we model, isolated from the world, in our minds, in the office, and escape into a journey through conceptual and emotional geographies and through the relational contexts of the alive space. Everything, on the one hand, to widen in unpredictable directions the range of possibilities and sources of inspiration available to the creativity of the architects. And, on the other hand, to modulate the interpretation of this vast area of creative possibilities, to the tangible reality, in a more precise, more interesting and lively way, putting it in a fertile dialogue with the site, with the inhabitants, with their personal, social and political life, and with the precise response to a few practical questions: at what pace will be the breathing, what will be the usual position of the shoulders or the spine, the affective color and the mental mood, how people will embrace each other, how often will they smile in the spaces that we build as frames / frameworks / installations of the public or private lives of our clients ? What emotions, thoughts, intentions, personal trajectories, what social lives and what political systems grow in our spaces? Beyond providing an eye-catching visual appearance, how will our living spaces be lived by their inhabitants with their "seven senses"?And finally, because the world is again overturning in a self-destructive impulse, its vital values, being attracted by inept uniformisation and reductionism, up to the annihilation of intelligent life (of humans, trees and animals alike), how could we create architectures of cooperation? How can we integrate our public lives into the social geometries of respect for diversity, healing the social injustice and the obtuseness that, unfortunately, get more and more common? Common also due to the architecture and the not quite honorable relationship of architecture and urbanism with the political or economic potentates of our societies.

 

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How NOT to Plant a Baobab in Greenland

mapping & responding to the clients` genuine needs

redefining the minimum vital of modernists

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After the training in The Alive Space, we will move to a game designed for the usage of architects & urbanists as a tool for mapping more profoundly their clients’ requirements and genuine needs, in order to propose spaces that are not useless or, even worse, detested by their inhabitants, but rather help them harmonize themselves with the humans and nature around. Still work in progress, How NOT to Plant a Baobab in Greenland / a board game for post-apocalyptic relationships was first presented in Now the impulse is to live! curated by Raluca Voinea  @ CCA Topocentrala, Sofia, 2022 and was developed in and after a residency in January 2022 at Tranzit Bucharest on Performing Survival. Carambach`s Lesson.The idea of architecture as an extended body is the main focus of this workshop. Conceived in a more biological and flexible frame than the mechanical ”minimum vital” of modernists, integrating some fundamental movements from nowadays life and cognitive sciences, we will start from each participant`s survival dance styles, needs and ways of inhabiting Earth. From here we will transfer to the architecture as an extended body inquiring how the openings, closures, dynamics needed or refused, how the personal space with it`s vital areas of protection, growth and it`s relation to the common spaces and the outside areas should be for each potential client.How NOT to Plant a Baobab in Greenland is also conceived for people who intend to live and work together, from couples to partners, from organizations to communities. In our world of multiple crises, where all the conflicts and wars show us more and more obviously that the quality of our relationships, or the lack of it, extends or shortens our life on earth, good relationships, with ourselves and nature included, may indicate, in fact, if we have any future at all. Sustainability and resilience depend mainly on them.How can architecture help in this gardening humans` issue, making sure that mistakes as Le Corbusier`s Chandigarh project will never repeat? As Henrik Valeur mentioned in a lecture in Chandigarh: “The problem with modernist architecture is not only that it tries to erase the past; it also obstructs the future!”

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Fragile Penguins on the Edge of Gravitational Waves

giving space to what is fragile and complex

polyphonic & sensitive trauma architecture

 

On the 12th of February 2016, the gravitational waves` discovery day, a tiny notice mentioned the death of hundreds of Alison penguins, because the ice under their feet melted. Leaving the patriarchal delusional figure of ”maître et posseseur de la nature” that already exhausted planet and humans as well, can we envision some rules of generating space for what is fragile and complex in us and in others, humans as well as non-humans, allowing it, in a matriarchal manner, to live? After all, the thin ice of civilization is made exactly of this: social and political willingness to give space to what is fragile and complex. All European States` Constitutions proudly declaim their obligation to ensure the human resources blooming by guaranteeing all citizens` rights to intellectual & cultural diversity and by creating the appropriate conditions for health & prosperity. A solemn constitutional warranty of states toward citizens, not just electoral words without mandatory deeds!In 1906, Okakura Kakuzo said about our civilization: “we used to think you the most impracticable people on the earth, for you were said to preach what you never practiced.” If Popper, Arendt, Huxley, Jung or other contemporaries of last century's wars and totalitarian regimes would ask us if we used the last few decades to avoid, through a substantial democratic practice, any turning back to undemocratic nightmares, what shall we answer? Did we learn from kindergarten, the human equal rights’ social dynamics (choreography) well enough, not to miss the steps and fall down again? Did we encourage logical & problem solving approaches, instead of growing unquestioning conformity reflexes? Did we train enough our multiple viewpoints thinking and our emphatic “mirror neurons” in order to understand (and even love) other possibilities and forms of living – the spectacular polyphonies of the world? The recent growth of popular sustenance for undemocratic leaders and for extremist propaganda shows we didn't learn yet that democratic dance on polyphonic songs.Fragile Penguins proposes a way out of this citizens` democratic training/practice deficiency by making young architects aware that architecture and urbanism are like huge sociopolitical fitness apparatuses. We cannot train for the natation Olympics exclusively on a tennis field, nor have a non-discriminatory democracy as long as the architecture of our cities is keeping people fit for other regimes (with geometries of power, privileges, inequalities, competition, obedience, lack of self-determination).Gathering participants eager to convert the geometries of power into geometries of cooperation and to switch our society to collaborative mindset & reflexes through urban insertions of polyphonic architecture, Fragile Penguins on the Edge of Gravitational Waves proposes the research of effective tools for devising structures in which the social dynamics of nondiscriminatory democracy can be practiced daily. Following this workshop, a polyphonic architectures hub, gathering, beside me, architects and specialists from different disciplines will be created, decolonizing our imaginary and our practical approaches as a way to envision as many islands of nondiscriminatory democracy as possible, so the fragile ice of Europe’s democracies will not melt under the most fragile of us again.