Transversal Territory
2022
Workshop and Public Presentation
Concept and direction Onzgi & Mansoureh Aalaii
A collaboration between the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio USI and the Città di Mendrisio
One of the major challenges of our time is to rethink what we mean by ENVIRONMENT. For a long time this term has designated an «around», an «elsewhere», an «outside», an «other», a fuzzy reality that meant everything that was not invested in or urbanized by humans, and therefore would not concern us, or only indirectly. It is now essential to readjust our view of it, to rethink the notion of the environment as a space that is part of us, with which we are inextricably linked - a spatiality that exists among, with, between, through and within us. The environment, it’s right here! The aim of the workshop TRANSVERSAL TERRITORY is to nourish our imagination and to broaden the scope of our environmental sensitivity, through another possible experience of our own living space.
In this workshop, students in collaboration with the local community of the investigated city carry out artistic-landscape-architectural interventions. These ephemeral interventions are carried out IN SITU. The intention is to investigate urban areas that we live in, that we walk through every day, surroundings so familiar to us that we often show a lack of interest or even contempt for them. The aim is to give them (for a moment) a sensitive, tangible and playful experience, to charge them with an unexpected, enigmatic and transgressing energy that will affect the usual perception of them.
This workshop is conceived as a laboratory of experimentation. The approach, while being rigorous and precise in the proposed theme, is deliberately playful and without demands for usefulness, leaving complete freedom for experimentation and research. The aim is not so much to give hasty answers or to produce new marvellous landscapes, but rather to discover, experiment and develop a visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory sensitivity, allowing us to take a new look at our living space, to understand, feel, see and live the notion of environment with «enlarged senses». In this sense, this workshop is first of all addressed to our IMAGINATION. At the end of the workshop, the public will be invited to live and share these interventions in a PUBLIC EVENT.
TRANSVERSAL TERRITORY is a design course of the Accademia di architettura di Mendrisio realized in collaboration with the City of Mendrisio.
