Author: Sonja Hohenbild
colonialcriticalmemorial.wordpress.com
For more information please contact: shohenbild{a}gmx.net

To Create a Participatory Living Memorial to Commemorate the Un/Common Colonial Histories considering its Impacts for Today

If you are trying to suppress a ghost, it becomes bigger and more powerful.
proverb from Kalaallit Nunaat, (Danish: Grønland)

Selective memories cannot be avoided, but they can be counteracted.
Norman Davies

The starting point is the impact of colonialism for the societies of today.The underlying premise is that the suppressed and overwritten violent colonial history is the basis for today’s racist policies and everyday racism. But what could be the means from an artistic-political perspective (with small p from the periphery) to address and acknowledge this legacy? We have to start very low. A fast change might be too optimistic and therefore could be an attempt to suppress it again.

I created a blog http://colonialcriticalmemorial.wordpress.com/ in order to discuss and exchange ideas, how we want to construct the memoryscape we are living in. I know how difficult it is to form a new group without an economical or even ideological perspective, as the possibilities that a memorial to commemorate colonial times in a critical way would be really built in the next years in Germany is very low; the only possibility is to create a ground for a step-by-step memoryscape where several initiatives are already de-colonizing the public space (Zeller, 2010) – and to keep
reclaiming an “official” memorial with the participation of all the groups concerned.
Making suggestions and playing subversive tactics.

How could it be possible to implement memorials as one possibility from the periphery without the acknowledgement of the state? Maybe murals or projections on (private) houses or temporal sculptures, together with a portal for all commemoration initiatives and activities from books and films to commemoration-days and political activism. Trying to make the diversity of memories and the whole memoryscape accessible.

I am trying to get people together who are concerned about colonialism and its legacy, to discuss and create a proposal about how the commemoration between a “former” colonizer, and a “former” colonized society could be promoted, practiced and built.
You are all invited to discuss, built a working group and create!
a living memorial!

Author: Michela Barone Lumaga

http://holisticurbanobjects.tumblr.com/

This call for designs is to start the first public investigation related to my MIT thesis project, “Public by Design: Auto-fabrication for a Contemporary Urban Physiognomy” which unites digital fabrication of urban objects with participatory design. The question my thesis seeks to answer is how to improve urban quality by introducing new ways to build structures for civic life. I envision a future in which the people will feel ownership of their city by proposing new functions for public space and by being the designers of it. This thesis also seeks to re-frame the relationship between artificial and natural. Pavilions, city gates, fountains, rostra and obelisks are artifacts which express the character of the local civic society and constitute the social infrastructure of the urban environment. These places are the sites where public good is produced and represent significant contact points between the institution and the citizens. My research will result in a manual and a kit of parts for building six new typologies of Public Objects in contemporary cities.

The Project

The Holistic Urban Objects are prototype scaffolds for participatory public-ness. Public is intended as an extensive concept that accounts for other species of beings and networks of objects. The Holistic Urban Objects will create awareness and social responsibility. Their physical structure acts as catalyst of interspecies exchanges and will express new unexplored civic functions as chosen by the citizens. This project proposes a method to create a super-urban space that is part of a global networked plot: publishing online a set of drawings of the Holistic Urban Objects that can be easily fabricated with a CNC router allows the audience to participate in the physical making of space in any place of the world, by building their own. The fabricated object, built by CNC cut ½” plywood sheets, is going to be customized using local materials (wood, leaves, building scraps, plastics, etc.). The architecture, therefore, reflects the ecology of the place because customization is enacted by humans and other species that decide to inhabit the structure.

The Experiment

As part of this first experiment on participatory design for our cities I am asking you to draw your ideal Holistic Pavilion by drawing only one component: the RIB. The current structure of the Holistic Pavilion works like this:

You can design the RIB in any shape you want, and the rib can account for hosting another being or specie, which will be the SKIN. In my case, I have decided to cut holes into the digitally fabricated RIB to intertwine tree branches. The Holistic Pavilion becomes the ecology of its surroundings and declares your idea on its public function. There is no restriction in scale for your design since it could be occupied by humans, animals and microorganisms. You can print the drawing kit attachment, draw on it, snap a picture and send it back to mblumaga@mit.edu.

After The Experiment
Once I have received drawings of your rib and pavilions designs I am going to make a model with laser cut Masonite 1/8” thick. The models will be shown at my final presentation with your name, public function, and geographic coordinates (for ex. Bubi Tazo “Pavilion for Interspecial Communications” 42°21’41′ N 71°05’13″ W).

Author: Nemanja Crnobrnja
www.nemanja.tubmlr.com

The Sound Pavilion was built for the Museum Of Contemporary Art in Belgrade, Serbia in 2010.

Products of contemporary design and architecture, in most cases are reduced only to the visual perception of form or space. Therefore, Sound pavilion examines action that can encourage an active relationship between the object and user.
Using natural attributes of environment (context), space is described through four sound sensations (volume, diffraction, reflection, absorption). It’s abstract, but multi-layered information – more from less.
Perception of space is changeable, and also his character. Goal is to explore the relationship between architecture and space / city and man / built and natural, only through data taken form context.
Its structure is basically a hole, a nothing that converts its surroundings into a sense.

Artist: Nick Degtyarev

http://nickdegtyarev.org/

The artist takes a sample of soil from a city dump site. Along with documentation of the action, map and additional information it is exhibited in front of the entrance into one of public parks.

Artist: Nick Degtyarev

http://nickdegtyarev.org/

The piece consists of an object and a video record. The artist tracks a closed-loop route with a camera and gps-receiver attached to the body. The route is based on the civil boundary of one of the districts of Moscow. The camera is constantly on during the period of 1 hour 47 minutes which is just enough to go 10,3 kilometers. And the gps-receiver takes off the data of the landscape height.
The object repeats the outline of the district and the change of the landscape height. Thus the artist manifests through his body the presence of hidden boundaries in the city, either administrative or ideological walls which separate and specify districts.

Author: Miguel Costa
Open Monument’s transformations between 2010 and 2013 made by: Crestuma’s inhabitants;
Meireles de Pinho; Miguel Costa
www.maipublicspace.com

The installation of a “monument” that revisits the image of a maize crib on the riverfront attempts to restore an old relationship between some of Crestuma’s existing maize cribs and the river Douro.
Further, this new element intends to become a landmark giving a new visibility to the town from the river, and, simultaneously, leaving its appropriation open by allowing room for collective actions from inhabitants and artists, who may intervene, modifying it continuously, proposing thus new authorships, new social dynamics and new senses of belonging – an “Open Monument”.
The “Open Monument” project is a public space installation that intends to recover the link between the inhabitants of Crestuma and its landscape symbols/history. At the same time, intends to boost an experimental, pedagogical and participative realm that could develop new senses of appropriation and belonging.

Project supported by Madep/Fbaup, Trans_Form_Actions European Project and Crestuma’s local government.

Author: NC-office (Architecture & Urbanism)

http://www.nc-office.com/

The project considers the existing procession one encounters on Cuban Memorial Boulevard located within the Little Havana neighborhood. Walking through the Park, one experiences a series of monuments commemorating an event or an individual. Rather than a point, which symbolizes a singular event, we suggest embedding a field of small objects such as pinwheels or solar powered lanterns around the roots of the Ceiba tree. These objects symbolize the countless souls that have been lost at sea.

The development of the project took course through careful documentation and measurement of the existing Ceiba tree and subsequently a physical model was built through an analog process. The idea of such an endeavor is ultimately to gain a better understanding of the biological form of the root system and to emphasize its contrast to a rectangular field of symbolic objects.