METASITU
TDCU IZZ
The chronicle of increasing isolation of a group of artists attempting to reach the World's most remote human inhabited place, the island of Tristan da Cunha.
THE VISIT
Meziara is a village in Northern Lebanon, where most of its residents do business in Nigeria for most of the year, before returning every summer. The suburb to an invisible city.
TORA BORA
The extraction and export of 'Jerusalem Stone' is one of the most lucrative businesses in the Palestinian Territories, and remains highly unregulated. Everyone wants a piece of the holy land.
MEMENTO LOCI
Souvenirs are tokens that help to perpetuate spatial narratives. Mass produced around the world, they serve as a vehicle through which power narratives are unfolded and displayed.
MEMENTO LOCI unpacks some of these strategies.
14th DISTRICT
Slavutych was built to rehouse the workers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. It is made up of 13 districts, each inspired by a different Soviet city. With 86, we are building a new district based on Athens.
STOP OVER CITY
Moscow City is a decaying business district in Central Moscow. By linking it to the two largest airports in the city and giving it the status of 'international transfer zone' we would revitalize this vacant territory.
STATES, STATUS,
STATUES & STATUTES
VDNHk park in central Moscow is a spatial technology that serves to advance an imperialistic idea based on an old regime.
(re)appropriating (post)soviet narratives.
NATION STATE OF MIND
Nation State of Mind proposes an alternative understanding of the nation in a post-national world. What is the role of territoriality and locality in Ecumenopolis?
#mariupolwillnotdie
#itistheworldthatwillend
Mariupol is a mono-industry town in Eastern Ukraine. Its population has been shrinking since the collapse of the USSR. This is a manifesto to embrace its shrinking condition and work with it.
EXPEDITION TO ECUMENOPOLIS
Expedition to Ecumenopolis is a series of workshops that we deliver to different groups in order to collectively think about ideas evolving around contemporary urbanism in the age of hyper-globalisation.
VOCABULARY FOR ECUMENOPOLIS
In the era of Globalization and the Antropocene, we find that there are a new set of urban qualities/phenomena that take place globally. Here is a glossary that attempts to identify some of those.
#mariupolwillnotdie
#itistheworldthatwillend
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Conceived and developed in the city of Mariupol and supported by Izolyatsia’s “Architecture Ukraine” program, in the Donbass/Donetsk region of Eastern Ukraine, the project #mariupolwillnotdie #itistheworldthatwillend is a manifesto for the future urban development of the city. The performance in the video was used as an active tool for research and knowledge building, a catalyst to generate future scenarios.
The performance allowed us to to embody the quest of the project , that of inverting the narratives around growth in the urban matrix, by literally reversing our movements in the post-edition. This subvertion allowed us to exemplify the need for changing discourses, mindsets and practices, attacking the expansionist-by-default neoliberal logic.
Whereas the urban population world¬wide continues to grow, shrinking cities are ubiquitous. Mariupol, a city whose economy heavily relies on an industry that is increasingly being automatized, is no exception. Numerous shrinking cities across the world have embraced different policies for reducing their urban mass in recent years- “smart decline,” “strategic shrinkage.” Yet, we find that these strategies often hide intentions of growth instead of fully embracing the ebbing condition.
The main research questions were about subverting the understanding of growth, more specifically, in terms of the master planning: What would happen if shrinking were to be embraced? How would it be planning for reduction instead of expansion?
We find that there needs to be a shift in paradigm, one where cities accept their shrinking condition and actively plan for it. This can trigger multiple new opportunities that experiment with consensual decision-¬making processes, where the citizenry gets together to establish protocols for their collective future in a reduced built environment rather than following the master planning logic of zoning.
ECUMENOPOLIS
Shifting the paradigm about shrinking cities
Video Installation/8’20’’ ----- 2015
US