WORKSHOP: The Only Clients Will be Our Lives

WORKSHOP:

The Only Clients Will be Our Lives

with STEALTH.unlimited (Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen)

Topic: creating “worlds” of equality within the (capitalist) world of inequality

 

Location:

Bomassan /

Grannskapskontoret
Pepparvägen 1
123 56 Hökarängen

 

–It is the paradox many of us encounter: while we dedicate ourselves to initiatives, projects and proposals that aim at a ‘better’ future (more resilient, fairer, more inspiring…), we experience to be operating from a present we increasingly feel alienated from. And there we find ourselves: continuously in the search for a resilient context for our practice and production. Looking around, sharing experiences with fellow souls, it is evident that this vulnerable position undermines the reach and impact of that future (and life) we care for.

However, if present is such, it is high time to use our capacity to disrupt its unfolding. In this desire, we are not alone. Over the last years, a vast number of initiatives have sprung up to take matters into common hands and re-design the very reality from where we work, how we live and how we exchange among each other. It may not come as a surprise that imagining, designing and constructing such different ‘existential’ and professional realities to a large degree entails working on their (different) economic groundings.

 

PROGRAM:

 

Tuesday 13/3 (@Bomassan)

18-20 evening talk

on City in the Making, with three scenarios on the future by 2024

As co-initiators of City in the Making in Rotterdam, STEALTH have since 2014 engaged in bringing a fraction of “toxic” remainders of the public housing stock (back) to forms of common use, as a site to produce new instances of economic and cultural reality. What started from two abandoned buildings, meanwhile has grown to a network of seven buildings at our disposal for limited time. They form a starting ground towards the much larger potential of (re-)commoning urban resources for collective benefit, to arrive at a horizon of long-term socially and economically sustainable life, possibly including an internal Basic Income. We will discuss what the future might look by 2024 – the year when the contract for the first building will run out.

 

Wednesday 14/3 (@Bomassan)

10 – 13 morning talk/discussion

on systems of deprivation and systems of support

This talk/discussion starts from an unsettling view on a set of systems of deprivation and entanglement (real-estate rooted in speculation, money and its relation to debt and work that is redundant) that ‘lock’ us currently in our daily realities. In response to this, what are the acts and instances of what we could call “structures of mutual support”, opening up both the politics and practices of possibility, to arrive at alternate realities for our lives?

14.30 – 17 workshop session 1

introduction and work in groups

17 – 18 collective discussion

from 18 cooking together

Thursday 15/3 (@Bomassan)

10 – 16 workshop session 2 

participants work in groups, on their own

16-18 discussion on findings

 

The Only Clients Will be Our Lives is developed and presented as a collaboration between STEALTH.unlimited, the KKH course Research-Lab: Architecture, Urban Artefacts, Collective Representation and the Konstfack course Sites and Situations – organising platforms for socially engaged design and architecture.

 

*) Please note that the workshop has limited number of places. It is primarily for course participants from the Konstfack course Sites and Situations and the KKH course Research-Lab: Architecture, Urban Artefacts, Collective Representation. To attend you must sign up before 6th March by sending an e-mail to magnus.ericson@konstfack.se

STEALTH.unlimited (2000, Rotterdam/Belgrade) is the spatial practice of Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen. Their initial interest in the ‘stealth’ urban processes manifested itself in a series of research and mapping projects. Following a number of curatorial involvements that explored and exposed collective citizen capacity to confront the neoliberal enclosure and financialisation of space, around 2012 in Belgrade and Rotterdam they co-initiated long-term engagements to deal with the spatiality of production and (social) reproduction, particularly in the domain of housing.