ADS7: Being With-In

In 2023/24, ADS7 will continue to practise forms of conviviality. We will use these convivialisms as tools to challenge all of the possibilities of coexistence. In particular, this year the studio will investigate what it means to “live together with difference” within the super-diverse settings and migration-driven processes of our contemporary world. Our cities are now defined by inhabitants of different origins, or faiths, with different economic, legal, or social status. Negotiating difference is therefore a natural part of meeting, negotiating, and living in public spaces, which often become spaces of “visibility and encounter between strangers”. Under what circumstances might these encounters be considered convivial? And what forms of design can originate from these encounters?

ADS7 celebrates the spaces informed by conviviality as those where racial, ethnic, religious, class, and gender differences are rendered unremarkable and ordinary. These are spaces where inequalities are neutered.

The studio will work with such spaces and actions. We will question the demarcations and distinctions that fuel injustice and marginalisation, while also preventing everyday interactions from becoming sites of provocative boundary-making. We will go beyond voiced categories – such as ethnicity, or gender – to dissect how people perceive differences simply through the ways others think, say, and do things. We will argue these forms of thinking, saying, and doing lack readily assignable labels.

Ultimately, we will design convivial architectural devices that engage with and across diversity. Last year we performed togetherness as a gentle act of resistance. In 2023/24, we will further deconstruct its politics as a way to reassemble its mechanisms in space.

We will curate precise architectural scenarios that bridge social and cultural boundaries. These scenarios will always allow for heterogeneity, remaining convinced that a shared language, or a sense of identity, should always empower both individual and collective life, while rejecting sameness.

For ADS7 conviviality is connected to subtle quotidian practices, balanced with unmarked routines and exceptional acts of improvisation. This tight relationship with the everyday is exactly what makes it politically relevant. When addressed convivially, daily encounters not only become privileged moments to perform processes of debate, translation, and consensus building, but also sites of possible constructive tensions.

In ADS7 conviviality transcends its common English meaning of an atmosphere prompted by a festive, friendly joyful gathering. On the one hand, we strongly relate to its Spanish etymological root “convivencia” , which refers to the peaceful coexistence of Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities in Medieval Spain. On the other hand, we are open to including irritation, dissatisfaction, disagreement and frustration as equally important modes of human togetherness.

To determine the political impact of conviviality, we will explore the uncharted territories that combine peacefulness, conflict and dependency, and reinvent the design and spatial requirements for such dynamics to take place.

Conviviality entails multiple types of being in space. ADS7 is interested in how being within particular sites can affect the occupant’s being as a person. Belonging is not an abstract concept, but something to be cultivated through inhabiting and experiencing, which is influenced by various degrees of spatial complexity.

Indeed, we admit urban spaces do not necessarily facilitate expression and lived difference, but often act as fast ‘spaces of transit, with very little contact between strangers’. ADS7 will therefore look for congregational spaces, where people of diverse backgrounds spend a significant amount of time. Prof. Ash Amin identifies them as micropublics: ‘spaces of habitual engagement, interdependence and prosaic negotiation’. He also highlights that conventional micropublics might trigger illusory contacts, since ‘co-presence and collaboration are two very different things.’

The micropublics we will engage with require us to interact and communicate on a daily basis, fostering mutual knowledge and familiarity through iterative behavioural patterns. ADS7 will examine convivial opportunities to augment our understanding of these spaces, allowing us to sample unexpected micropublics between private and public spheres, and to build new ones.

Recently, conviviality has been such a buzz-word in academia one can even speak of a ‘convivial turn’ in certain fields of the social sciences. Bringing this idea into a design-led architectural realm can help clarify what conviviality can do and what researchers – together with designers, citizens and policy-makers – acting in more interventionist terms, can do with it.

For ADS7 conviviality is the subject of study, the methodological approach and the expected outcome. Last year, we analysed the two Convivialist Manifestos, where conviviality appeared as a normative -ism, a desired state and an empirical necessity that is produced by humans as active agents. In 2023–24, we will continue to use design as a medium to jump between praxis and theory, working toward conceiving projects that form independently creative manifestos. Our architectural projects will be grounded in current policies in an attempt to subvert these policies, which urgently need updating to reflect current political demands.

During the first half of the twentieth–century, a Russian theatre practitioner, Konstantin Stanislavski, developed a systematic approach for training actors. Known as the ‘Stanislavski System,’ this system proposed using the art of experiencing, in contrast to the art of representation. Stanislavski wanted actors to live – rather than simply perform – roles. This method relied on the Magic If – the ability to imagine oneself within fictional circumstances and then envision the consequences of those situations as if they were real.

The studio will work as close as possible with reality, constantly re-imagining its conditions and possibilities through a combination of meticulous research and creative inventiveness. We will use performativity to construct alternative forms of inquiry, prioritising the lived, embodied experiences of both real contexts and designed objects.

While the Stanislavski System was revolutionary, it caused several controversies. Not only did actors, who were required to record their emotional reactions to daily happenings, suffer from emotional fatigue, but also the audience often became so absorbed in the realism of the acting, they forgot the narrative power of the play. Similarly, when conducting design-led research on conviviality in super-diverse settings, we must be ready to address ethical challenges. We must be careful to not simplify reality for design purposes. Although ADS7 advocates the construction of public 1:1 experiences – valuing playfulness as a fundamental political weapon – we must acknowledge the asymmetries in our relations (as architects and researchers) with those who inhabit the places we investigate. In this acknowledgment, our work – in its spatial, representational, and design forms – hopes to play a significant role in shaping urban policies.

The agency of conviviality not only refers to the collaboration between humans, but also the interactions and relationships between humans and material objects. This broadens the spectrum of diversity, multiplying the nuances we need to deal with. In 2023/24, ADS7 will continue to enable linguistic links between props, bodies, architecture(s) and the urban fabric.

Here, it is worth mentioning the notion of ‘public space commons,’ which is frequently used as a metaphor to evoke a vague atmosphere of relaxed spontaneity and unrestrained freedom. This has little to do with existing commons, which are typically characterised by an active management of shared resources, often as the result of pressing material needs. Commoning is an act of survival. An attempt to secure domains of autonomy from state and market forces. Public space is not a commons per se. A constant struggle is required to preserve it as such. This space should be treated as a versatile resourcescape that can be activated to support collective subjectivities and community organisation. ADS7 celebrates these aspects, mobilising conviviality and convivial architectures as means of subsistence, which has a material and relational capacity.

Notes on Conviviality:

Marcel Mauss, The Gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies (1925)

Ivan Illich, Tools for conviviality (1973)

Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as another (1990)

Ash Amin, Ethnicity and the Multicultural City: Living with Diversity (2002)

Gill Valentine, Living with difference: reflections on geographies of encounter (2008)

Mette Louise Berg, Magdalena Novicka, Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture: Convivial Tools for Research and Practice (2019)

Oscar Hemer, Maja Povrzanović Frykman and Per-Markku Ristilammi, Conviviality at the Crossroads: The Poetics and Politics of Everyday Encounters (2020)

Andy Field, Encounterism: The neglected Joy of being in person (2023)

Tutors:

Sabrina Morreale and Lorenzo Perri are architects, educators and founders of Lemonot - a duo for spatial and relational practices, architecture and performative arts. They aim to re-invent the relationship between urban fabric and human rituals through a wide range of media: pavilions, exhibitions, short films and designed performances. Dealing with multiple stakeholders at the same time, they often intervene as both facilitators and designers - constructing supporting spatial structures to make things happen.

They both graduated from the Architectural Association. In 2018-19, they taught at INDA in Bangkok and they’ve been Programme Heads of the AA Visiting School El Alto (Bolivia). Lorenzo taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (dieAngewandte) in Architectural Studio 1 from 2020 to 2023, while Sabrina is currently Studio Master in the Foundation Course at the AA in London. Together, they now lead the ADS 7 at the Royal College of Art, London.

They collaborate with several cultural institution - including Arquine, La Biennale di Venezia, DPR Barcelona, LINA European Architecture Platform, S AM Basel, Architecture at the Edge (West Ireland) - and their projects have been exhibited and awarded internationally: among the others, at the Young Talent Architecture Award 2016, at the ATT19 Gallery in Bangkok, at the RIBA, at Vienna Design Week, at Bangkok Design Week, at Milan Design Week, at Mextropoli 2021 in Mexico City, at FAR-Architecture Festival of Rome 2022 and at CAFx Copenhagen Architecture Film Festival 2023. Furthermore, Lemonot is one of the 9 selected architectural practices for the Padiglione Italia of the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023.

www.lemonot.co.uk
@_lemonot