Tools for Urban Exploration   

with:
Kollektiv Raumstation
Eleni Boutsika Palles
Matilde Igual Capdevila

participants:
Kathrin Schuster, Maria Ines Neves, Ömer Gürel, Nargis Kurtkaya, Lilla Kammermann

#Vienna Architecture Summer School 2022
#urban #research #otherspaces #asfound  #fiction #power #gender #everyday

This workshop module aims at introducing the participants to a critical and poetic reading of the city, through the acquisition of tools for understanding, documenting and decoding, but also through interaction with the urban and human environment, and opening up to artistic practices.

The first part of the workshop is led by Kollektiv Raumstation. Together, we will develop "research apparatuses" for a critical artistic exploration of gender issues in public space. To do so, we will first discuss selected texts on feminism and urban space and sharpen our gaze with small observation tasks. Based on this, we will design, test and implement very serious research apparatuses, with which inequalities or processes of gendering can be detected and made visible.

The second part of the workshop is led by Matilde Igual Capdevila and Eleni Boutsika Palles and aims at exploring the connections between art, architecture and the city. Using walking and scenography as situated urban practices, we will set out to explore the surfaces, textures, shapes and stories of the urban environment of the city of Vienna and practice translating field research into making space.

As inspiration and research focus we will study the element of water in the city. On the first day we will go for an extended walk around the city of Vienna to visit public pools, ponds, fountains and the (not so blue) Danube. Looking into the politics and spatial dramaturgies of these everyday places, we will collect patterns, images, sounds and scenes.

On the second day we will work indoors on the translation of the collected material into new narratives and fictional mise-en-scènes echoing the physical sites. Finally we will collaboratively work on an immersive installation as a collage-repository of atmospheres: a new otherspace.

Kollektiv Raumstation. Always on the lookout for new impulses, we explore the city. We work critically and playfully at the same time, locally and in concrete places, also away from the much-noticed metropolises. With interventions, audiowalks, mappings, or exhibitions, we humorously question the usual, explore, uncover power structures, doubt and interfere - sometimes in an uncomfortable way. In fantastic reinterpretations we let possibilities for change emerge. Founded in 2013 in Weimar, we are now also active as an open collective in Berlin and Vienna. Main tutors from Kollektiv Raumstation will be Hannah Niemand and Gunnar Grandel.

www.raumstation.org

Eleni Boutsika Palles is inspired by urban fabrics, terrain vague, transitional landscapes, urban and social utopias, Eleni’s practice travels back and forth between scenography and architecture. Based in Vienna and Innsbruck she has over the years developed a passion for humorous glimpses into our increasingly perverse relationship to architecture, cities and objects. Eleni holds a Diploma in Architecture from the NTU Athens and a Diploma in Scenography from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and attended the Art & Science master’s degree programme at dieAngewandte in Vienna. She is currently teaching at the department of architectural theory at the University of Innsbruck, Since 2018 Eleni is also a co-editor of the magazine ADATO.

www.elenipalles.com

Matilde Igual Capdevila’s work combines walking, collecting and building installations. Her practice deals with urban realities and the everyday life. Her current research focuses on the unfinished in the city as a physical, concrete manifestation of economic, climatic and social crisis, and as a site for resistance.She graduated in Architecture ETSA València and holds a MA in Fine Arts from dieAngewandte. Currently she is a PhD candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. In 2018 she co-founded the Institute for Linear Research and co-curated the 2018 contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale of Liechtenstein with the project THE LINE.

www.matildeigual.eu
www.instituteforlinearresearch.org

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