Making Futures: Cultivating Uncertainty

Making Futures Bauhaus+ travels to Palermo for the second in a series of mobile workshops. Taking part will be participants selected via an open call.

Often there is an enormous gap between the ambitions of those responsible for spatial development (politics, architects, planners, economists) and the reality. This gap holds within it a state of uncertainty. At the same time, uncertainty opens new potentials for collective spatial practices and embodies the resource for their material manifestation.

From June – November 2018 the city of Palermo hosts the European Nomadic Biennial Manifesta12. Titled “The Planetary Garden. Cultivating Coexistence” the edition´s “main ambition is to work in a truly interdisciplinary way with local communities in order to rethink the basic architectural, urban, economic, social and cultural structures of the city.”(1) The geographical and cultural position  of the city at the crossroads of three continents makes it an ideal location to investigate some of today’s most urgent questions and explore possible futures

Within this context, the action-research project Making Futures Bauhaus+ travels to Palermo for the second in a series of mobile workshops. Taking part will be participants selected via an open call. The intensive, 4-day-programme encompasses a curated visit to Manifesta12, public readings, cooking sessions, conversations and site-explorations with local partners. During the workshop participants are encouraged to collect diverse material in a multiplicity of formats, which will be discussed during the workshop’s “class time” (feedback sessions) to finally assemble a collective journey log (bitácora de viaje-пътепис).

Mobile workshops are ambulatory learning constellations geared towards dialogue, collaboration and lasting relations that hope to expand the traditional field of academic research and its network. Most importantly, these real-time constructions reaffirm the project as an open, reflexive and practice driven format.

During these four days we will review state and mafia’s ambitions in Palermo and keep our eyes open for the unfolding gaps and the unfinished moments. The programme includes visits to re-purposed Pallazi that are currently staging exhibitions and artistic interventions, a failed housing development transformed into a belvedere by architecture collective Rotor, an urban garden developed by Coloco together with the community of an isolated social housing complex, a piece of land used as a scout’s base that was confiscated from the mafia and it’s currently staging a site-specific installation by Cooking Sections. In what ways is the unfinished and the uncertain affecting spatial production? Can uncertainty be understood as a resource itself?