Parasite2.0 (Milan, Italy) investigates the status of urban life by developing interaction and intervention devices outside conventional systems of contemporary architecture. They are currently members of the ViafariniInResidence programme. They have previously worked on “The Third Island Ag ’64 ’94 ‘14” for the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale and “Parasite Trip” for the 2012 edition, as well as “Radical Islands, The New Ibiza” for Bloop Festival and “Urban Hacking Machine” for Lo-Fi @ Wired Next Fest 2013.
Wikyplaza as Radical Island
The city right is more than a right of individual or collective access at the resources that it saves and protects, it’s a right to change and reinvent the city. The cases of loss of the city right occur also during the design mode of the public spaces, today monopolized by the neo-liberal market interests and by the statal bureaucracy. The 2011 movements exactly start from the public space and from its democratic use, choosing as their center big and significant places of the city. Turning business and leisure areas into purposeful and propulsive places, into laboratories of new practices, giving the democratic function back to the urban space, through the prolonged (almost permanent) occupation.
The physical configuration and the drawing of these places lose importance, while the activity that occurs,
foreshadowing of a new democracy, obtains more relevance. In “Causes and Reasons of Desert Islands”, Deleuze talks about continental islands recalling definition of geographers on derived or accidental islands, which arise from a fracture of the mainland, an erosion that has taken them away
living through the sinking, a detachment, labeling itself as different and foreign body. Among control stitches and its boundaries, observable in our capitalist cities, we see growing spaces able to slip it away, real desert islands for new men, for a new vision of urban freedom with different codes and ethics.
In 1516 Thomas More writes “The Utopia”, coining for the first time this word, trying to elude the censure of that epoch and making it coinciding with an imaginary island that the author particularly draws.
The most interesting feature of Utopia Island is its new codes and ethics system, exactly representing the opposite reflex of the Henry the VIII’s England and foreshadowing a different and possible world.
It’s exactly from these systems of rules, that constrain the use of the public space, that we have to restart, formulating new ones. We can read the public spaces of the 2011 re-appropriations as radical islands with sharp borders, within which a new reality can start afresh and where a new elaboration of forms of democracy can be possible.
“Dreaming the islands, no matter whether with anguish or joy, it means dreaming of separating, of being alreadyseparated, far from continents, of being alone and lost, or rather starting again and recreating. There are derivedislands, but island is even that to which it’s drifting, and there are original islands but island is also origin, the radicaland absolute origin.”
G. Deleuze, Desert Island
Radical island blaster_ mobile laboratory for the afterthought of a radical urban space
In 1996 Lacaton & Vassal astonished the entire European architectural scenario thanks to a requalification project of a public space, using their radical proposal of the Palais de Tokyo, which simply asked to leave the space as it was, yet considered full of possibilities. The workshop starts from the construction of a low cost nomadic device with the purpose of reactivate possible radical islands within the Timisoara post-soviet landscape. Using it in order to reformulate the public space drawing process and starting by building a debate place where questioning on what they can be and become in order to activate a process and not to find a definitive solution. The workshop square will be transformed into an active laboratory for and on the Timisoara public space, as the squares of the 2011 movements were be transformed into places for the elaboration of a new form of democracy. During the five days, the participants and the citizens will work inside the radical Island bluster with the aim of writing the “Carta of use of the public space”, starting from the restrictions of the city bureaucracy. They will create a Catalogue of Radical Islands within Timisoara, mapping them, and an Archive of Good Practices to use it as example
for the future The three parts will form a Fanzine that, with the Radical Island Blaster, will remain in Timisoara as heritage for the future of its public spaces.
prezent!