Archilab 2004 > 6th Orléans International Architectural Conference
from 16 October to 30 December 2004
ArchiLab has been introduced, and is produced, by the City of Orléans, in partnership with the Centre Regional Council, and backing of the Ministry of Culture and Communication (Heritage and Architecture Office, Centre Regional Current Affairs Office), in collaboration with the FRAC Centre (Centre Regional Contemporary Art Fund).
Wilfried Hou Je Bek (1975) Netherlands
Wilfried Hou Je Bek left school at 16 to become both a writer and a squatter. Under the moniker of socialfiction.org he has organised countless of psychogeographical walks all over the world. Currently he is developing a “little language” for psychogeography that allows everybody to record & share experiences of urban space. Recent commissions include work for the city of Dordrecht, Psy Geo Conflux (New York), the PixelACHEfestival (Helsinki), RAM5 (Riga), Urban Festival (Zagreb), Urban Drift (Berlin). In 2004 he won the Transmediale software art prize for .walk, a futuristic project for open space that transforms cities into computers.
ON/Stalker > osservatorionomade > Italy
Francesco Careri (1966), Aldo Innocenzi (1964), Romolo Ottaviani (1967), Giovanna Ripepi (1965), Lorenzo Romito (1965), Valerio Romito (1971)
This hybrid collective, founded in Rome in 1995 is defined as an urban art laboratory. In 2000, Stalker presented Transborderline, a habitable structure made of barbless barbed wire symbolizing a three-dimensional frontier, shown in several exhibitions as the 7thVenice Biennal or Manifesta 3 in Lubljiana. In France, in 1997, the group exhibited at the Visual Arts Institute Gallery in Orleans, then at the Arc en Rêve Architectural Centre in Bordeaux in 2000. In 2001, Stalker took part in the exhibitions Paysages d’entre villes/Intercity Landscapes at the Zadkine Museum in Paris, Libérez Beaubourg/Free Beaubourg at the Pompidou Centre, and the GNS exhibition held at the Palais de Tokyo in 2003. In preferring “architectural actions”, Stalker focuses its interest on the city and everything that forms its abandoned and disused spaces and waste areas. It suggests to the public various walks through “urban voids”, and thus criss-crosses, Rennes, Milan, Miami or Berlin. Close to the theories of the Internationale Situationniste, Stalker creates a map based on residual places left over by galloping urbanism. By means of the above-mentioned methods, the collective proposes a reverse reading of a network which forms an architectural project: the urban mass turns into blocks separated by all the many channels of marginal zones devoid of all functionalism. Since May 1999, Stalker and the Kurdish community in Rome have been sharing a building called “Ararat”. The group is thus experimenting with a new form of public space based on accommodation and hospitality. Since 2001, Stalker promotes a research network called the Osservatorio Nomade. This contributes to the creative evolution of territories through crossed fields of planning, experimentation and educational programs in relation with local inhabitants.
Posted by walkinginplace at November 3, 2004 06:37 PM