bushcrafting post-automotive landscapes



with 
 Kollektiv Raumstation  

# trafficisland # urbanbushcraft # spatialappropriation


This workshop investigates traffic islands as extreme environments produced by postmodern, car-centric planning. These sites are part of the city, yet they are cut off, overlooked or designed to be ignored. Participants are temporarily stranded within these fragmented sites and challenged to confront their urban seclusion through practices of urban bushcraft (“the use and practice of skills to survive and thrive in a natural environment”). What potentials do they hold? How can we make use of them?

Participants are asked to bring objects they consider essential for surviving a hostile cityscape or for the rapid appropriation of space. Equipped with these items, we set out toward a selected urban island, arriving not as observers but as agents entering an unfamiliar and resistant environment. These objects are put to the test: some prove useful, others fail, revealing shortcomings, dependencies, and assumptions. From there, participants begin to develop new tools in direct dialogue with the site, adapting their objects, exchanging or combining them with others, or crafting new ones altogether. These tools can take different forms: methods of documentation as well as interventions that create temporary moments of comfort. Through this process, engagement with the site shifts continuously between understanding what is already there and testing what could be made possible.

By questioning the dominance of car-centric planning, the workshop explores alternative relationships between asphalt and soil, movement and stillness, and humans and nature. The workshop reimagines neglected infrastructures as contested terrains, raising questions about access, resilience, and creating new imaginaries of post-automotive landscapes.


Kollektiv Raumstation seeks to stimulate the analysis, discussion, revitalization, and reshaping of urban space and to inspire its transformation into a place of interaction and shared experiences. The collective works with experimental methods of exploring space, artistic-activist interventions, and activating processes. Its focus is the role of residents – as day-to-day experts, as the beneficiaries from and proponents of change, as doers. In short: as those who really matter. Founded in Weimar in 2013, Raumstation is also active as an open collective in Berlin and Vienna. 
https://raumstation.org
︎︎︎ MEDIA   tool-making, interventions, spatial appropriation

︎︎︎ LOCATION outdoors

︎︎︎ TEACHING LANGUAGE English

︎︎︎ WHAT TO BRING essential objects for spatial investigation 

︎︎︎ REQUIREMENTS  no specific requirements

︎︎︎ MAXIMUM NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS  6

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