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#INTRO
Welcome to ''The Abandoned Project"!
It's a creative practice for online collective thinking-with and making-with. Something that takes place in between online and offline, inside and outside, objects and conceptual actions, Albania and the world, Dervician and you and me.
My name is Hugo. I’m a student in KABK, an art school in Den Haag, the Netherlands. This is my project amidst a trip to Albania, a pandemic and my home in Rotterdam. I invite you to read, write and think together with me.
There are two concurrent actions. One is a glossary that I suggest us to build together as you read the text. It is a form to populate, expand and share meanings. The glossary is about speaking and listening better, as words are 50% of the speaker and 50% of the one who hears. I hope we can later debate on it in part #3. Also, this will be included in the final version of the text and it is gonna be part of this mode of writing-with.
Part #2 of the practice is about populating the abandoned setting. Your imagination will be needed. This platform is to allow us to discuss and generate together some contingent answer related to spatial-material or even virtual-immaterial reality. This can be a very difficult question and task, but I believe this is one I should not be trying to answer on my own.
This is where our “creative practice” starts. It is going to have three parts. You can do them in your own pace and join on Part #3.
The next Part #3 will take place on the 20th of June, 2020.
If you want to join, please scroll down to part #1.
PART #1
The first part is to read something I have got to share as a conversation starter.
Pay attention to the links during the reading. It can take you to a video or the glossary.
To access please click on the magazine on the right. It will open a new window.
PART #2
Welcome back here. This is part #2 of our “creative practice”. As I said, it’s going to have three parts. You can do them in your own pace within the time-frame, just so we can possibly have a part #3 together.
In the chapter “The abandoned building in a twofold city”, I enumerated six qualities from the building. I think those can foster us in our imaginative task here. They are here again in the slider below.
Now choose between Action #1 and/or Action #2 and don't forget Action #3!
"It’s important to apply architectural thinking to social conditions. This doesn’t mean that design solve issues, but acknowledges that to think about social issues spatially and historically can reveal unseen structures. To work within these frameworks is to work politically." (Meme, 2020)
Action #1:
Pick one of the qualities in the slider above and apply to your environment.
Tip: pick a quality that provokes you. Perhaps, that quality make you expand that idea that you have been already thinking about. Your environment can be your room, a building or the city. What have this pandemic made you stop and think about? How would that apply spatially?
Action #2:
Pick one of the qualities in the slider above and apply to the abandoned building.
Tip: watch the video to get more context of the place. This was my action in the place. However, how would you fill one of the rooms? Or do something in the facade? Or even in the red multisport court.
Action #3:
Fill in with comments or ‘brainstorms’ our glossary so everyone involved can get an insight from your perspective of what we are all doing collectively.
At the end of this session, it will become the notes in the text. Expanding the narrative of a lone observation towards a whole new shared scenario.
Examples:
Let's suppose you pick quality 1. And the idea of an entangled world calls your attention. You can come back to the text and the glossary to find about the idea of “entangled world”. And you have an idea of how this would work on the scale of your neighbourhood. After your action, you can even add the new meaning you discovered for it.
If you're not feeling inspired. Maybe these questions in a text of Bruno Latour thinking about the current pandemic condition can help:
Question 1: What are some suspended activities that you would like to see not coming back?
Question 2: Describe why this activity seems to you to be anxious/superfluous/dangerous/incoherent and how its disappearance/putting on hold/substitution might render other activities that you prefer easier/more coherent.
Question 3: What kinds of measures do you advocate so that workers/employees/agents/entrepreneurs, who can no longer continue in the activities that you have eliminated, are able to facilitate the transition to other activities?
Question 4: What are the activities, now suspended, that you hope might develop/begin again, or even be created from scratch?
Question 5: Describe how this activity appears to be positive to you, and how it makes other activities easier/more harmonious/coherent that you prefer and can fight against those that you judge to be inappropriate.
Question 6: What kinds of measures do you advocate to help workers/employees/agents/entrepreneurs to acquire capacities/means/finances/instruments allowing for restarting/development/creation of this activity?
Hope this helps!
Output:
Don’t worry about the format of your proposal. By this I mean, it can be textual and look like a starting point for a policy. It can take the format of a drawing and some diagram, scheme or abstract drawing. It can be a video, highlighting some spatiality or condition of a place that triggers you or it can also be an interview.
Also don’t worry about the scale, if you want to address something in your house, in your room, a piece of furniture, or an object. Or in the scale of your neighbourhood: a street, a building (like I did), or a facade. Or even on the scale of the city, like a bridge, a river, a masterplan. And show how connections could be different.
PART #3
Now I'm going to collect your submissions and work on a collective spatial proposal for the abandoned school building in Dervician - or beyond!
I'm going to compare your submission with the other participants and place them on top of each other. I hope this will form an image of alignments and conflicts, tensions that are enriching for the debate of a place.
I hope this project to not just represent us, but to generate a collective, imagine a world, act in a common reality we could find in a space in-between and even towards imagining futures.
If you still want to join me in the making of this final image/video, drop me a line and I will let you know when I'll be working on it and we find a way to keep doing it together!