Building Institutions
(2023);
TICKETS (FREE)
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/539435214247 

Building Institutions is a series of public space initiatives.
Focusing on re-sensing urban space becomes a method of deinstitutionalising care and learning in form of a public drawing workshop.

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The action of slowing down in urban landscapes is considered as regressive, dysfunctional. The act of slowing down is the act of listening to the own body and un- derstanding the noise it is surrounded by.
Play contradicts the intention of functionality as it is often considered as an intuitive action.

By engaging in play in collective and urban spaces, the exchange is possible, the exchange where we are able to reawaken the childlike nature of the body and its gesture, but also exchange with the other. By slowing down we become aware of our senses, our place in the space.
A-topical spaces are described as places that do not have a reconsidered purpose or function. By slowing down the sidewalks, parks, forests, squares, public is welcomed to take a stencil and a piece of chalk and leave a mark on the passing place.

The workshop establishes an institution where re-claiming individual bodies is possible. The city becomes an a-topical space whose potentiality shifts as knowledge of our own body deepens.

an organization, establishment, foundation, society, or
the like, devoted to the promotion of a particular cause
or program, especially one of a public,
educational, or charitable character:

This college is the best institution of its kind.
the building occupied by such an establishment.

a public or private place for the care or confinement of
inmates, especially mental patients or other

 persons with physical or mental disabilities.

Sociology. a well-established and structured pattern of
behavior or of relationships that is accepted as a funda-
mental part of a culture, as marriage:
the institution of the family.

any established law, custom, etc.

any familiar, long-established person, thing, or practice;
fixture.

Using stencils serves as a method that can welcome broad- er public into the workshop as it offers a form of expression, mak- ing it easier for hesitant passerby to mark the city. Stencil leaves no space for expression: ‘i don’t know how to draw:(‘.




















Artist Workshop




Invited artists take up a role of an intruder of senses. Each artists focuses on one specific sense that they will try to accentuate. This brings an interesting misbalance between the environment and the participants senses. Artists welcome new form of interacting with the space while also at the same time being faced with immediate feedback on their knowledge. Methods used by artists passively intervene on stencils as well, it becomes a collection of artworks, a collective piece and documentation of the past.

Use of chalk enables legal, non-intrusive engagement with public space where disruption is possible through action of slow- ing down, drawing and conversing with the others who are present.

Non-invasive nature of chalk is important as it represents a pos- sibility of radicalizing the urban space through creating a time for establishment of care and community rather than embracing van- dalist, performative acts.









ON ORGANS




Facilitator

As a facilitator, the role presupposes ensuring happening. Safety, requirements of artists, urban study of the space and providing tools come as primary activities. Facilitator is both a singular person and a concept of creating the collective moment. A person as a guide and the one responsible for action. The concept as a model for future possible interventions. Facilitator collaborates with institutions to introduce a model of change.


Artist

Each guest artist is contacted by facilitator and through their dialogue the expansion of drawing initiative is happening as a workshop based on material knowledge of specific artist is welcomed. The artist is in no way an educator on the pedestal, the artist shares their input of being and welcomes the perspective of the other, allowing for exchange and re-contextualisation of art, broadening its reach outside of the white cube.

Participant

A participant is given freedom and structure at the same time. Participant is an individual slowing down and a member of the city. Duality of roles that happens in that moment juxtaposes one another and leaves the participant in an in-between space, an a-topical space. Participant’s actions are voluntary yet presented to them in an institution setting. Participant choses to resell or go with the guidelines.

Collective

Formed as body of participants, it is a force, a shield, a safe space that cares for the vulnerability of single individual by its simple characteristic, its multiplicity. Collective is a flux of others  making it a stencil to be applied over variety of cultures.

Material

Body enduring and containing memory of the happening. A body, clay, plant, soil, asphalt, chalk, sound.. its form varies, but its purpose of a unifier and motivator for self exploration remains the same. Decontextualised, fragmented, it teaches about complexity of materiality we face in everyday life and how treating material with respect over functionality allows for stronger connection between body and the outer- body.


Senses

Heavily hierarchised trough systems, each workshop accentuates one of the senses. Senses are subjective and liberating, they are a pathway towards e

quality.


Public

A society in a boundary, the space that reflects sociological complexity. Space and time containing different forms of space and time. Where disruption happens and its effect can be mirrored back, it offers an intense face to face experience where choosing to go agains puts us in a difficult position. It is where exploring the difficult is possible.




Each workshop expands as an organ of the future institution.

Institutional criticism is heavily saturated in our current state
of society. Instead of acting against, what is proposed through
this program is acting with. Dismantlement of institution is unre-
alistic and it can only be substituted with another model of power
structure under a different name.

This series of workshops and public interventions aims to work with
the institutions to create an alternative model that is in-between
current structure and complete unpredictability. Understanding pur-
pose of institutions and their functionality matrix is the ground
on which the initiative is built, however it looks at broken links
between institutional organs in order to create a possible solution
to its dis functionality. Working With is a context where insti-
tutional methods are used and re-formatted, in order to offer re-
flection and collective learning. A process of learning to learn to
learn to unlearn if you wish.

PURPOUSE OF WORKSHOP

Research on medical institutions in the frame of psychiatry has
outlined the cruical role of community in treatment of mentally
disordered and neuro-impaired individuals. Observing arhitectural
models where mental hospitals were placed in the close circle with
the surrounding urban area has shown immense improvement of lives
of patients and medical workers. Furthermore, by implementing and
highlighting individual’s strenghts, skills and knowledge, a sense
of purpouse and responisibility in how they act towards themselves
as well as the others has raised questions about current state of
workplaces and consumers of urban spaces. The workshop forwards
care and responsibility as core values of future active citizens
where health and individual needs aren’t marginalized but embraced.

POLITICS OF LOCATION / ORGANIC CITIES

situated practices and collaborative processes

Formulated by the feminist poet Adrienne Rich (1929–2012), a politics of location aims to reconnect thinking and speaking with a situated experience, a particularity, a geography, a body. The politics of location does not however take locality as the site of foundational knowledge; rather, it understands location as the place of experienced connections and intersections—through routes rather than roots. In that, the local begins, not with a bounded site but with historical contact, in relations and translations, and by displacements. The local takes place as an itinerary, a series of encounters, contacts, and conflicts, on routes that enable and discipline the movement of beings and things; where politics is situated.
LOCAL=PARTICIPANT

the organic cities adapt to individual social and economic pre
ferences, to the constraints of the natural landscape, and to the dominant technology of the city

In history, organic form is associated with slow growth, akin to the gradual accretion of cells, their gradual replacement and renewal which are much closer packed than the way similar units of development are added to and deleted from cities today.
The basic organic model involves the growth of a town from some center of initial growth or seed, the growth proceeding in compact form around the center in waves of development like the rings of a tree. This growth, however, is likely to be distorted by radial lines of transportation along which growth often proceeds faster due to increased access to the center, the ultimate form of town thus resembling some star-like shape.


GROWTH = a metaphor for building/constructing an institution. The shapes translate as a base ground for institution in non-spatial terms making it transportable and adaptable to variety of spaces. It is based on adapting to nature and human need in the environment itself.