WIP#8-11
08 - 29.04.2021
WIP — Work in Progress is a multidisciplinary series dedicated to sharing and debating work, discourses and processes that are being produced at a given moment. Following the series initiated in 2020, the online sessions WIP#8 to WIP#11 were curated by Bruno Alves de Almeida, and took place on thursdays during the month of April 2021.
WIP#8-11 explores a series of practices that work at the intersection of the exhibition space with the city, ranging from the building to the curatorial proposal, from the written and discursive field to the masterplan, floating between and through architecture, art, urbanism, curatorship and other hybrid fields. Practices that seek to question and transform the social conditions of the places in which they intervene, as well as to test the limits and procedures of their own areas of operation. Practices that point to other ways of producing and dealing with the material and immaterial dimensions of space, from individual to urban scale. "Space" not only understood as a delimited and definable entity, but as a fluid product of culture, a construct that comes from the codes and relationships that are socially and culturally prescribed and rewritten.
08 April – Bruno Alves de Almeida
Bruno Alves de Almeida is a curator and architect, currently the curator and resident liaison of the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht. His practice has a context-specific and transdisciplinary approach fostering intersections between art, architecture, urban theory, and the social and natural sciences. His interest in exploring the co-defining relation between social and spatial dynamics which shape our urban and natural environments lead him to create projects ranging from the context-responsive SITU (2015- 2018) and 1:1 (2018, on-going) – which commissioned Latin-American artists a series of site-specific works bridging private and public urban spaces in São Paulo, Brazil – to others such as the Environmental Identities series (2020) – which looked at the correlation between self/social identity and the natural. Bruno is an alumnus of De Appel’s Curatorial Programme, Amsterdam (2018/19). He collaborated with institutions such as the Harvard Graduate School of Design; Storefront for Art and Architecture; 11th São Paulo Architecture Biennial, and others. And is the recipient of grants from the Hyundai TATE Research Centre: Transnational, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, among others. Bruno is an alumnus of De Appel’s Curatorial Programme, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2018/19). Holds a Master’s degree from the Mendrisio Academy of Architecture, Switzerland (2013), and a Bachelor from the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Oporto, Portugal (2009).
15 April – O grupo inteiro (Carol Tonetti, Claudio Bueno, Ligia Nobre e Vitor César)
O grupo inteiro gathers different practices and repertoires in the fields of art, design, teaching, architecture and technology. Comprised of Carol Tonetti, Claudio Bueno, Ligia Nobre and Vítor César, the group seeks to multiply paths and establish conditions for public dialogues through political-aesthetic propositions informed by different networks, platforms and projects realized by its members and collaborators. Their works articulate relations with different cultural and academic institutions, collaborators and partners, local and international. Currently, they are working on the research “Drought, Nurturing, Orós, Caatinga, Sertão [DNOCS]” in the context of the fellowship ”Regeneration: New Institutional Practices”, 2020, at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam.
22 April – Asli Serbest and Mona Mahall
Asli Serbest and Mona Mahall work together across spatial, image, sound, and text practices. Their projects evolve into online and offline spaces, installations, objects, models, and publications that play and replay architectural histories, events, and movements, with the aim to rethink the production of space and implied power relations. Following their feminist constitution these projects propose themselves less as fixed spaces and objects than as non-linear temporary versions.
Serbest/Mahall exhibit and publish internationally, among others at Biennale di Venezia, Istanbul Biennale, Pinakothek der Moderne Munich, New Museum New York, HKW Berlin; in e-flux journal, Volume Magazine, Perspecta, AArchitecture, Deutschlandfunk, etc. They are the co-editors of Junk Jet, an independent magazine on art, architecture, and media. In 2019, they co-curated the 7th International Sinop Biennial 2019 under the title of “A Politics of Location.”
Before working as a professor for Temporary Spaces at the University of Arts Bremen, Asli Serbest gained teaching experience at Rhode Island School of Design, Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Stuttgart University. She studied in Istanbul, Vienna, and Stuttgart.
Mona Mahall has been a professor teaching crossdisciplinary courses in the art and architecture fields at Stuttgart State Academy of Art, Cornell University and HafenCity University Hamburg. After her studies at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, she completed her doctorate on speculative spatial strategies and on a critique of Modernism, together with Asli Serbest.
29 April – METASITU (Eduardo Cassina e Liva Dudareva)
METASITU is a collective that explores the way we relate to territory across time and disciplines, for a queerer tomorrow. Their practice is centered around non-hierarchical symbiotic pedagogies that take the form of urbanism residencies, architectural interventions, intentional communities, self-publishing, real estate experiments, and videos. Their work has largely focused on shrinking cities in Eastern Ukraine and the Russian Far East; mainly through our ongoing project 'The Degrowth Institute', where they explore ways of incorporating notions of degrowth to urban masterplanning. More recently, we have been researching vacancy, and ruinification processes in Dubai’s office towers. We are currently teaching architecture at INDA, Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok).