the institute of placemaking
Recently, together with Jia Gu and Pieterjan Grandry we founded “The Institute Of Placemaking”, which is also a wining entry at Eme3 festival of Architecture. This means we will built it! 28 of June – 1 of July in Barcelona, be there!
The Institute of Placemaking is knowledge exchange center and a public institution that gives spatial possibilities to people who desire a place for new ideas and new encounters within the city.
An office-cabin and a table are the simple architectural elements around which workshops, dinners and collective gatherings happen. The Institute acts as an infrastructure that ‘grows’ through a series of curated workshops dealing with public action, knowledge exchange and experimentation with do-it-yourself methods of production, which extends to building, making, cooking, using and re-using. Workshops are focused around the looped system of resources, and particular attention is paid to what is commonly neglected in the production cycle of materials or goods: waste. The Institute proposes a 6 workshops that begin to treat the city and its byproducts as a resource.
Over time, individuals and organizations in the neighborhood can plug into this structure, and begin to propose their own spatial interventions or knowledge exchanges. Dinners and artist-led bars will play a catalytic role to the getting to know the neighbors and facilitating new encounters..
The Institute proposes a four-day series of workshops and events during the festival:
DAY 01 Build Your Own Solar Cooker
Do-It-Yourself Marmelade Workshop
DAY 02 Soap Opera: Making Soap from Scratch
Solar Cooker Tester + Taste Test
DAY 03 Recycled Furniture Workshop
DAY 04 Big Lunch
ONGOING Exhibition in the Institute
Artist-led Bar
The Institute of Placemaking is about creating new places from abandoned spaces through knowledge exchange and collective actions in the city. For Eme3, we propose re-using the city as a resource, whose products, people and places are all part of a larger cycle of production.
Our workshops and activities operate on the premise of re-use happening at two scales. First, through a series of workshops focused on the production cycle of things and the continuity of systems. The products of each workshop accumulate into a final lunch with the community and festival participants. Leftover groceries from local markets will be cooked in the solar cookers, DIY marmelade will be served with dessert, self-made soap is used to wash the dishes and recycled furniture makes the setting. Eventually all food-waste will end up in a compost bin that can be the start of a community garden hosted at the Institute. Secondly, re-use happens within the entire installation, which will be open for plug-in programs and appropriation by the community.
This once empty lot is transformed into collective space that is shared and actively used by local citizens, visitors and festival participants, beginning to offer to local citizens a sense of place.
// This is an interactive representation of the project, you can zoom and drag or pan your way around it.//
