WORKSHOPS
Our program offers two parallel tracks, allowing participants and viewers to think with each other through our present moment, either by following the live broadcast or by participating in our workshop program, both in-person or virtually. The public is invited to further participate by becoming a member of the Archipelago Telegram group, where the discussion can continue after each conversation.
The workshops are conceived and conducted by students, researchers, and practitioners from around the world, many of whom participated in our Open Call. They are free and fully accessible to the public.
IN-PERSON WORKSHOPS
Swiss Society of Engineers and Architects X Archipelago
Salvage City: Making New From Old
MATIAS ECHANOVE and EMMA-JULIA FULLER
1 Session
Saturday May 8th (Full Day)
This daylong workshop aims at upcycling marginalized, underused or disconnected pieces of our city into a brand new city, much more sophisticated and exciting than the old one. Participants form small groups, which go on a mission in random parts of the city. They meet strangers; gather quotes, notes, objects, sketches, photos or videos. This precious material is then used to recompose an “urban fragment” (architectural, poetic, political or otherwise). This “element” must be a kind of statement and express a concept or an idea – it can be concrete, abstract, infinite, basic, multiple, complex, paradoxical... It can be anything the group wants. Each group presents its fragment to the others. Groups then decide whether they want to connect their fragment to other fragments. Groups must agree on how their fragments should be connected. The nature of the connection must be explicit. Some connections can be straightforward, others may be deceptive, or even become a space in themselves. The end result is a mixed media urban assemblage, a kind of labyrinthine multiverse, made of connected and disconnected parts. It’s a collage city that’s much more promising than the old broken one we started from.
Workshop in English–French.
Ecologies of Non-Design
EMMA KAUFMANN-LADUC and LAURO NÄCHT
1 (or more) of 6 Sessions
Wednesday May 5th (9-10 am CEST)
Wednesday May 5th (12-1 pm CEST)
Thursday May 6th (9-10 am CEST)
Thursday May 6th (12-1 pm CEST)
Friday May 7th (9-10 am CEST)
Friday May 7th (12-1 pm CEST)
To understand the city as a fabric of ecologies, we turn to what is out of sight, hard to conceive and hidden underneath the pavement. In a transect from the HEAD to the HEPIA, we walk through the urban landscape, interacting with sites where human and non-human infrastructures intersect; this might be at the scale of moss between stones, or a tree uprooting the pavement. We work intimately with these sites to develop an understanding (an ecological literacy, perhaps) of the complex interdependencies between human and non-human entities. The transect will be encountered with analog media as means of visual representation, for you to add on layers of your experiences and understanding. Here, the Anthropocene is no longer to be handled as an abstract concept, or a series of effects exclusive to landscapes of extraction and exploitation, but as present in the very fabric of the city.
Workshop in English–French.
Promenades
LAC / LÉMAN ARCHITECTURES CONNEXIONS
2 Sessions
Wednesday, May 5th (Full day)
Thursday, May 6th (Full day)
Beautiful as the chance meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella.
-Lautréamont
Since spring 2020, the LAC / Léman Architectures Connexions project has been organizing walks around Lake Geneva. Open to anyone interested, they take place in the company of speakers whose activities cover a wide range of fields. During these walks, which last several hours, a physical reappropriation and re-reading of the territory takes place, knowledge and sensitivities are shared, and collective reflections on our way of life and our relationship to the environment are developed. For this workshop, LAC / Léman Architectures Connexions proposes to rely on the thought of André Corboz, author of a reading of the built space through metaphors such as the palimpsest, the labyrinth or the hyperville, to imagine ways of telling the story of this archipelago that is the part of Geneva of which the HEAD and the HEPIA could be islands.
Workshop in French.
Image: Paul Klee, Zerstörtes Labyrinth, 1939, Zentrum Paul Klee
ONLINE WORKSHOPS
The Microbial Bathhouse
SERINA TARKHANIAN
2 Sessions
Wednesday May 5th (3-7 pm CEST) - Microbiopower/Somatic Phronesis
Thursday May 6th (3-5 pm CEST) - Co-creation of the Digital Bathhouse
As Western states dangerously flirt with a microbial-based biopolitics of control creating an embodied mistrust of microbial others, practices of co-healing which give rise to resilient communities of more-than-antimicrobial beings is critical to healing some of the marks the pandemic will leave. The Microbial Bathhouse proposes an island of co-healers that will materially experiment with the architecture of the body as a site for our becoming together as microbial beings. Through a series of trainings, participants will collectively produce a new vision of a bathhouse centred around mutual health. In this workshop, participants will learn DIY microbiology techniques such as experimental media culture production, produce new languages of human-microbe medical apparatus, tap into their somatic phronesis, their unique embodied health knowledges, and collectively construct a co-healing ritual for more-than-antimicrobial citizenry. The two-part training will culminate in an online joint bathing session in which participants will perform the more-than-antimicrobial ritual, creating the first ever digital bathhouse of its kind. Let us carve a path towards a microbial renaissance. Let us contagiously care with one another, to heal and hold one another beyond the wounds of this virus.
Workshop in English
Photo: Ronald Smits
Crafting Narratives Through Repair
BAGS (CYNTHIA DENG and ELIF EREZ)
1 Session
Friday May 7th (7-9 pm CEST)
Weaving together repair-oriented design practices with fiction narrative techniques, this workshop uses mending as a form of world-building. In this 2 hour workshop, participants will identify an object in need of repair (on the scale of something that could be picked up) and attempt to repair it. Here, ‘repair’ does not seek to restore past conditions, but adapts to future ones—it is a transformative act of care. While actively repairing the physical object, we will also compose stories that can speculate on repairing the larger systems and networks that this object is part of. Each person will craft a 6-word story that, when paired with before and after images of their repair, opens a portal to another world through the act of mending.
Workshop in English
Conflating Realms
CINDY DUAN
2 Sessions
Wednesday May 5th (3-5 pm CEST) - Introduction & Tutorial
Saturday May 8th (3-5 pm CEST) - Concluding Discussion
With the migration from IRL to URL comes a blurring of lines—our experiences of architecture are now through the webcam window, making the Zoom grid a pastiched archipelago of global locations. What does it mean to exist digitally and physically simultaneously? In this workshop participants will use photogrammetry to contribute to a collective AR installation, a digital landscape of objects. Through this process we will reflect on and hypothesize the role of the digital intersecting with the real, and investigate the curation of identity in these spheres. (Required software: Meshroom or Regard3D, Blender)
Workshop in English