The banks of the Maritsa River in Plovdiv are taken as the test site for an intervention of the Open school, led by Tamar Shafrir/Space Caviar in collaboration with members of the local Roma community, as well as design and architecture students from Bulgaria and the Netherlands.

Currently, the riverside in Plovdiv represents a latent potential for urban activity, but thus far the space is mainly used by one community—Stolipinovo, the largest Roma community in Bulgaria. The workshop will bring together Bulgarian architecture and design students with design students from the Netherlands to investigate potential sites and modes of encounter along the Maritsa. Through textual, visual, filmic, and material observation, the river’s existing role within the city will be documented, and new possibilities for activation will be tested, considering an urban society of multiple perspectives and behaviours. These possibilities will then be facilitated through a series of installations along the riverfront, experimenting with the territorial nature and implicit codes of public space. The students will also be encouraged to consider the river itself as an occupiable space through the creation of floating infrastructures. Each installation will comprise not only a physical construction of materials but also assembly instructions and a manifesto of use. Through this manifesto, students will contemplate the complex system of rights and restrictions embedded in national territories, as well as the ability of physical constructions to modify those rules or unleash new ones towards the creation of micro-territories, expose pressure points or develop sites of negotiation between different classes, ages, nationalities, genders, occupations, skillsets, and identities.

Space Caviar is a design research collaborative operating at the intersection of architecture, politics, technology, and the public realm. Founded in 2013 in Genoa, Italy, the studio uses exhibitions, events, publishing, and film to investigate and document the production of space and contemporary modes of habitation as forms of social and political practice. Projects include curated events such as SQM: The Home Does Not Exist (Biennale Interieur) and Atelier Clerici (Salone del Mobile); projects such as RAM House (Villa Croce), FOMO (V&A, Vitra Design Museum, Design MiamiBasel), Archaeology of Rose Island (Bi-City Biennale of UrbanismArchitecture in Shenzhen), and Neoasterisms (experimentadesign); films such as 99 Dom-Ino (2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, Lo scherzo dell’arte Film Festival, 15. Architekturfilmtage in Munich, Arquiteturas Film Festival in Lisbon) and Fortress of Solitude (London Festival of Architecture); and edited books such as SQM: The Quantified Home (Lars Müller, 2014). Space Caviar was founded by Joseph Grima and Tamar Shafrir, and its members include Andrea Bagnato, Giulia Finazzi, Martina Muzi, and Simone C. Niquille.

For more information about this intervention and the way to take part in it, please consult this file.

Supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL
When: 18.09-26.09; 10.00-18.00
Results presentation on 27.09 19.00-19.30
Subscribe at [email protected] before 15.09
Language: English, no translation
Where: 82 Maritsa Blvd.