In search of the Pluriverse
It's early morning. The sun is rising. A new day is beginning. Spring is in the air. It's time to figure out what needs to be done. Time to look around for alliances. We as humans are social beings. We cannot survive without others, yet we're all different - differences that sometimes seem hard to overcome. How to resolve this paradox? Graphic designer Miquel Hervás Gómez gives us a clue: "Comunalidad is what brings together the community itself. It's what is in between each member of the community. It's kind of like the binding, or the glue - you can call it many ways." This glue is what the First Peoples of Latin America, or Abya Yala as they call this continent, refer to as "communal autonomía". To explain what this is, Wong and Krier's pluriversal guide Arturo Escobar shares sound bites from a 2013 assembly with us: "Autonomies are not institutions but forms of relation. We need autonomy precisely because we are different. We are building a community of communities. Decommercialise speech. The secret is being like children and like water: joyful, transparent, creative, and in movement." Personal notes from the second Tramas y mingas para el Buen Vivir (Conspiracies and Collaborations for Buen Vivir) assembly, June 9-11, 2013, Popayán, Colombia, in: Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse. Radical Interdependence, Autonomy and the Making of Worlds, Durham: Duke University Press, 2018, p. 166
Joke Robaard / Domino / C (company)
2022, Amsterdam
Four people play a game of dominoes consisting of images from the (fashion) archive of artist Joke Robaard. There are 28 blackand- white spreads that portray people, or sometimes animals. The number of displayed creatures replaces the classic domino dots. The first player to lose all their images wins the game. Afterwards, the players talk about the possible meanings of the combination of images on the table. Robaard developed Domino / C (company) especially for this exhibition. Why do people come together, what is the drive behind these specific constellations? And what can be said about the moment one group meets another?
Nur Horsanalı / Animal Çeşmes
2022, İstanbul
Designer Nur Horsanalı collects manifestations of halletmek: the local ability to solve and fix things in an informal way. The drinking points in the photos are installed and maintained by İstanbulites who care for the city's stray cats and dogs. During her many walks, Horsanalı also came across drinking fountains, çeşme's, from the Ottoman era that include miniature basins for birds: a whole new sight for her. Why - she wonders - did we stop doing that?
Jay Tompt / Community of Dragons Forest Gathering
2021, Totnes
Attracted by citizen-led change and the Transitions Town movement, 'REconomista' Jay Tompt swapped California (USA) for Devon (UK). He organises and co-hosts sessions, loosely inspired by the Dragons' Den formula. Local entrepreneurs pitch their regenerative ideas, and the community responds by investing in different ways: from contributing financially to offering skills, hugs and homebaked cakes as encouragement. When you invest personally in something, it in turn becomes a part of you.
Ooze (Eva Pfannes and Silvain Hartenberg) with Marjetica Potrč / Of Soil and Water: King's Cross Pond Club
2015-2016, London
Imagine a construction site in the centre of London. In the middle of it, architects Eva Pfannes and Sylvain Hartenberg, and artist Marjetica Potrč created a natural swimming pond. The King's Cross Pond Club can be looked at as a staging of processes that occur between humans, water, soil, plants and microbes. The number of swimmers was determined by the capacity of the pond to clean itself: a maximum of 163 per day. The pond was temporary. However, the community of daily swimmers that formed around this natural pool is still connected. They miss 'their' pond to this day.
The Linen Project / Linen Stewards Practicing Collectivity
2019-ongoing, Arnhem
What if we grow, process, and make our everyday textiles and garments by hand, collectively? In April 2020, The Shared Stewardship initiative came into being as a community of thirty Linen Stewards. Together, they share the care and responsibilities of the entire process from flaxseed to outcome, while (re)connecting the social, ecological, economic and cultural on a local level. Because of the extreme drought in 2020, the flax harvest was challenged and the fibre came out brittle and short, but that didn't stop the stewards generating interesting experiments and outcomes. On display are objects from the first year. This non-hierarchical, resilient and slowly growing collective is now prepping for the third cycle of sowing, harvesting, processing and making.
Sabine Zahn / Fremdgehen. Ein Choreografische Stadterweiterung (40 minutes, 55 seconds)
2019, Berlin
The 'undefined' areas of Berlin are Sabine Zahn's testing ground as a researcher and choreographer. Together with other bodies, she delves into blind spots and transition areas, in search of (dis)connections. Over the years, she has developed physical tactics and scores to sense various cities, including Medellín in Colombia. This film is a movement piece. It shows four choreographic city duets between a performer and guest which take place at the same time and in the same place in the area around Anhalter Bahnhof. Choreographing relationships, the piece investigates the 'everyday-lifeness' of that central yet unspectacular living area close to Potsdamer Platz. When does drifting become dwelling? And in this context: can the body contribute to the discourse about the future of the city?
Kornelia Dimitrova / Playbook for Healing Environments
2019-2021, Eindhoven
Architect and social designer Kornelia Dimitrova puts it like this: "Healing is a process, and so a healing environment is about making space and time for inclusion, learning and adaptation". For years Dimitrova researched, observed and mapped De Grote Beek estate, a psychiatric institution covering 120 hectares in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. This approach resulted in specific proposals, or possibilities, structured in four time frames - what can be done in a few weeks, months, years and decades? A sun bed and a parasol can be placed on an empty meadow instantly. Can this 'immediate station' later be joined by an outside shower and in the long run by a bath house?