Pattern, Integrity

Mentor:
Amy Franceschini and Lode Vranken (Futurefarmers)
Guest:
Livia Cahn
When:
29 Oct / 01 Nov, 2018
Where:
Cittadellarte, Biella
Language:
English
TOPICS/TAGS: Systems, food, transportation, urban rural, trade, ethnography, interventions, architecture, mapping, walking, social sculpture, creative placemaking, public art, civic engagement, urban development, participatory art
Outline

“We say:
‘The knot was a pattern integrity.’
It wasn’t manila,
it wasn’t cotton,
it wasn’t nylon.
Nylon, cotton, and manila —
Any one of them is good to let us know the knot’s shape —
its pattern —
but the knot wasn’t any one of them:
it had an integrity of its own.
A human life is like that knot moving along the rope.”
(Bucky in R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe.)

 

Hosts Amy Franceschini (artist) and Lode Vranken (Architect) of Futurefarmers will bring a backpack of their last 8 years of work on Flatbread Society, a public bakehouse and farm in Oslo, Norway and a Site for Rural Regeneration, a tree house meeting space and exchange radio station at Pollinaria in Abruzzo, Italy. Both of these durational projects draw from fading agrarian practices and as a means to create new spatial and social engagements. Amy and Lode will share their experiences of each of these projects as they relate to Buckminster Fuller’s idea of Pattern Integrity.

Within this module Futurefarmers will problematize the language of “pattern” and “integrity” through four days of actions and inquiry. Using this Fuller quote as a reference point, they will look at an expanded ecology of practices connected to the knot; labor, regional politics/economies, communications, folklore, tradition and transportation. They will look specifically to the local history and currents of wool production to uncover this complex of intra and interactions.

They will work closely with Livia Cahn, invited guest, to inscribe new ethnographic approaches to their research and engagement. Quick actions and built environments will be enacted to articulate research done in the module.

Much of the discourse of this module will be rooted in readings and examples of other artists/ researchers from around the world, but most of the work will be based in research of the surrounding community. Each day will have field explorations and a round up of our encounters articulated in chosen formal modalities.



SCHEDULE:

Monday October 29th
morning
Guided tour to Cittadellarte, Pistoletto and Arte Povera collections and temporary exhibitions.
Introduction to the Theorem of Trinamics, the symbol of the Third Paradise and the concept of Demopraxy.
Introductions through readings.
Discussion about projects or works which participants are interested in.
afternoon
Discussion of projects or work participants are interested in.
Visit wool / textile fabric. Group discussion.

Tuesday October 30th
morning
SITUATIONAL INTELLEGENCE – Exercise in quick / rapid prototyping + improvisation.
afternoon
Visit sheep farmer or exporter of wool in the city.
Group discussion – How to enact the knot/ PROJECT IDEAS.

Wednesday October 31st
morning
Discussion: Three Ecologies/Chaosmosis.
Share artworks examples. 
afternoon
Build Looms.
Follow me home.
Discussion.

 

Thursday November 1st
morning
Exercise the looms in chosen locations.
afternoon
Dinner with people encountered in former days.


REFERENCES:

The mentor will prepare a reader for participants with key texts and films, some of which will be discussed during the week. The reader will include pieces by authors, artists, curators and intellectuals, such as:

Articles/Texts

Books (For further readings):

Film:



Images captions:
1. Futurefarmers, Seed Journey Procession, 2016. Photo by Monica Løvdahl. Courtesy of the artist.
2. This is Not a Trojan Horse, 2010. Photo by Daniela D’Arielli. Courtesy of the artist.
3. Flatbread Society, Oslo, Norway 2011-18, Permanent Public Artwork. Photo by Monica Løvdahl. Courtesy of the artist.
4. Flatbread Society, Oslo, Norway 2011-18, Permanent Public Artwork. Photo by Monica Løvdahl. Courtesy of the artist.
5. Erratum, 2011. Photo by Jeff Warrin. Courtesy of the artist.



Mentor

BIOGRAPHIES

 

Amy Franceschini (b. 1970 Patterson, CA, US) lives and works in San Francisco and Gent, Belgium. She is the founder of Futurefarmers, an international group of artists, activists, farmers and architects with a common interest in creating frameworks of participation that recalibrate our cultural compass. Their work uses various media to enact situations that disassemble habitual apparatus. Through public art, architecture, museum installations, publications and temporary educational programs inside institutions, they have transformed public policy, urban planning, educational curricula and public transportation plans. Futurefarmers’ work often creates relational sculptures and tools for audiences to gain insight into deeper fields of inquiry- not only to imagine, but also to participate in and initiate change in the places we live.
Futurefarmers are the lead artists of Flatbread Society, a permanent public artwork in Oslo, Norway and their most recent project, Seed Journey, a floating school moving by sail between Oslo and Istanbul.

Amy’s work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Whitney Biennial in New York, MOMA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, the 2014 Venice Architectural Biennale, the 2017 Sharjah Biennale, the 2018 Taipei Biennale and she is the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, 2017 Herb Alpert Award for Visual Arts and a 2019 Rome Prize Fellow in Design. 

Lode Vranken has been practicing architecture internationally since 1993. In 1993, he received his masters in a UN course on Human Settlements + Architectural Philosophy from the KU Leuven, Belgium. He has been teaching since 2005 as a Ned delegate at The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain and from 1993-94 at the Asian Institute for Technolgy in Bangkok, Thailand. Lode co-founded the research coalition, De Bouwerij in Belgium that focuses on social living structures for passive houses and zero¨energy construction. His research is focused on new concepts for small, self-sufficient living units; folding buildings, kinetic structures, rolling shelters all with zero carbon dioxide emission.

He is also a partner of Dear Pigs in Belgium and member of the The Ghent School for Metaphysics

www.debouwerij.com
www.dearpigs.be

GUEST

Livia Cahn (b. 1986) is trained in urban anthropology, graduated from the University of Cambridge (UK) then from the EHESS in Paris. She is currently based in Brussels, at the University of Saint-Louis, where she is a member of the collective ‘Ecologies de Bruxelles’ (https://ecobxl.hypotheses.org/) that tackles a host of environmental questions and explores ways to narrate them. With the other members of the team she is co-author of “Terres des Villes, enquêtes potagères de Bruxelles au premières saisons du 21ième siècle” (éditions de l’éclat, 2017). Based on an active engagement in the urban context, this book is about the struggle to defend agricultural spaces in the city. Livia’s collaboration with the architects ‘Rotor asbl’ in co-curating “Behind the Green Door” in Oslo (2014) and sometimes with artists is also an enquiry into the different ways of relating immersive, practice based, field research. 



APPLICATION PROCEDURE
Applicants must submit their application by email to: unidee@cittadellarte.it stating “UNIDEE 2018 application (your name)” as a subject line.
Applicants must attach the following documents (up to 8 MB in total):
1 - the application form (DOWNLOAD THE APPLICATION FORM)
2 - a portrait photo of you (JPG format, max 2 Mb)
3 - a selected portfolio (max 3 projects, one single pdf, max 6 Mb)

 


* The residency fee includes accomodation and half-board service.

Participation fee
500.00 €