KUB Arena   raumlaborberlin | BYE BYE UTOPIA    18 | 07 – 03 | 10 | 2010    

 
 
Invitation
booklet PDF		  
  

 
 
 
         

raumlaborberlin
BYE BYE UTOPIA, 2010
Kunsthaus Bregenz,
18.07. - 03.10.2010




   Starting in July 2010, the program of the KUB Arena, which was conceived as a platform for art and communication, will be activated more intensively than previously. Not so much to create an additional space for the classic presentation of contemporary art, but rather to open a venue for the negotiation of experimental forms of presentation and artistic production. The new program will be launched with a contribution from the architects collective raumlaborberlin (lit.: space laboratory Berlin).
In the KUB Arena, raumlaborberlin has undertaken an architectural intervention reflecting the main concerns of the group and simultaneously marking the space of the Arena as an autonomous location. A sloping plane cutting diagonally through the ground floor creates a second space which is accessible from the rear of the building. Above this slope, a walkable landscape made of doors from typical former East German ‘Plattenbauten’ (buildings constructed from concrete slabs) permits new perspectives on the architecture of the Kunsthaus. The construction space beneath the sur face serves to present the so-called ‘raumlaborwelten’ (lit.: space laboratory worlds) while indirectly referring to the inaccessible utility spaces in between the exhibition floors of the Zumthor building. With various media, past actions, projects, as well as theoretical references by the collective are presented here.		    
 
 
 
 
We often work with simple changes of perspective. What would be the case if this location were another location, different from the one we think we see in it? We make an effort not to be merely associative, but to develop concrete examples. This leads us to flood buildings, stage operas, build submarines, to organize festivals in skyscrapers, banquets beneath expressways, parties in underground railway stations, and also demonstrations. And every now and again we also build things. Temporary houses and objects which serve us as research station, stage, or prop in a new histor y for the location. raumlaborberlin
 
 
   
   
   
 
         
KUB Arena
raumlaborberlin
Bye Bye Utopia, 2010

Installation view KUB Arena, Kunsthaus Bregenz		   raumlaborberlin was established in 1999 as a platform for architects who since then have been pursuing a common aim in various working groups, namely a practice “beyond setting up rows of boxes for working, living, and sleeping.” Inspired by currents of Utopian avant-garde architecture in the 1960s, the collective playfully subverts apparently indispensable values of architecture such as its durability, in order to develop, with temporary interventions and ephemeral spatial concepts, alternative design options at the margins of an all too one-dimensional concept of architecture. It investigates urban transformations in order to fathom new perspectives in architecture and urban planning beyond the capitalist logic of usefulness and profitability. Whether it be as a reaction to the conservative, regimented architectural policy in Berlin during the 1990s, to the increasing privatization of public places, or to the buildings and fallow spaces in the urban landscape that have been deserted by Utopias, the collectively realized actions challenge conventional social meanings of urban utilization of space and investigate alternative potentials for architecture and urban space as dynamically experienceable and malleable social interconnections.    
 
Today our cities frequently have problems where thirty years ago an attempt was made to be progressive and visionary. Inner-city highways and their subways, dilapidated shopping malls and stinking parking houses, mass residential construction and its massive vacancy rate - we investigate these anaemic results of Utopian planning, we comment on them and develop scenarios for them. raumlaborberlin
 
   
    Apart from the core team consisting of Francesco Apuzzo, Markus Bader, Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius, Andrea Hofmann, Jan Liesegang, Christof Mayer, Matthias Rick, and Axel Timm, there is regular co-operation with experts from various disciplines in theory and practice. Here, too, the collective practice is understood as a continually expanding field. By activating forgotten or deserted fallow urban spaces, new public spaces are created - spaces for action which do not exist somewhere beyond individual practice, but only become activated through it, opening up alternatives to existing everyday practices. raumlaborberlin does not produce within projective Utopias, but within graspable fields of possibility.
For more than a decade, internationally active raumlaborberlin has been defining with sustainable interventions an extended, socially dynamized concept of architecture. For the project Hotel Neustadt in 2003, the architects developed informal urban strategies which have become exemplary also for sustainably effective co-operation between residents and artists. With X-Wohnungen (2005), Der Berg (2005), Küchenmonument (2006), and Der Orbit (2006) there followed a series of experiments defining vacant urban spaces as theatrical free-space. Subsequently, Spacebuster (2009) was developed at the invitation of Storefront for Art and Architecture New York. It is a bus from which a pneumatic envelope unfolds as a bubble with which the urban space is temporarily opened for communal uses. Apart from temporary architectures in urban space, raumlaborberlin has developed works in co-operation with the Kunstverein Heidelberg, the ZKM in Karlsruhe, transmediale 2010, and Kampnagel Hamburg. This year the collective will be represented for the fourth time at the International Architecture Biennale in Venice. 		   
         
       
         
    BYE BYE UTOPIA
Lectures, workshops, and round-table discussions		    
         
  Starting from an understanding of architecture as a socially, politically, and economically embedded practice, today a multiplicity of different strategies can be made out that investigate supplementary potentials of buildings and urban spaces to propose alternative designs in response to current urban planning processes. Frequently it is a matter of a practice that pursues the production of spaces of potential at the interface between architectural, urbanist, artistic, or even activist problematics. Within the framework of a two-part program of events, producers and theorists from various disciplines are invited to spend two weekends in the raumlaborwelt (lit.: space laboratory world) to discuss strategies for the production of space in urban surroundings on the basis of talks and round-table discussions, workshops, and film screenings. Proceeding from the raumlaborwelt in the KUB-Arena, the following questions will be focused on: What kind of visions for future urban spaces are presently being designed in architecture and art? What spaces for action are developed and generated? What is the relationship of these various approaches to the projective urban designs of modernity?    
           
           


raumlaborberlin
Projekt STICK on CITY, 2008
Venice, 2008
Shown at the exhibition
"experimental architecture"
in the Italian pavilion curated
by Aaron Betsky & Emiliano
Gandolfi		   BYE BYE UTOPIA ... welcome today!
Conceived in collaboration with raumlaborberlin		      
     
Friday, September 3, 2010, 6 p.m.:
Artists lecture by raumlaborberlin		    
       
Saturday, September 4, 2010, 2 to 6 p.m.:
DO YOUR THING – Public construction workshop with Markus Bader, Christof Mayer, and Axel Timm from raumlaborberlin. Visitors are invited to build the latest designs from the raumlabor do-it-yourself furniture collection in half an hour. The furniture can be taken home afterwards.

7 – 10 p.m.:
PLANNING vs ACTING – Discursive dinner with Klaus Overmeyer (Studio UC, Berlin), Hans Venhuizen (conceptmanager, Rotterdam), and Karen van den Berg (ZU, Friedrichshafen). Lectures and discussion as well as informal talks with the guests at an evening meal. Urban-planning, strategic and artistic approaches in dialogue.

From 10 p.m. on:
raumlabor music department
     
         
    BYE BYE UTOPIA ... welcome tomorrow!
Conceived in collaboration with Matthias Böttger (raumtaktik)		      
           
    Saturday, September 25, 2010, 4 p.m.:
SPACES OF TOMORROW - Opening lecture

6 to 10 p.m.:
IMAGINE YOUR FUTURE! - How can images be developed for a post-ideological future without totalitarian aspirations? Images which, as self-fulfi lling prophecies, open up spaces of potential and confront the urgent questions of our time? Who are the Future Urban Performers? Stakeholders from the fields of art, sociology, architecture, and theater are invited to the raumlaborwelt to search for the spaces of tomorrow and to dine and discuss with one another. With contributions by Matthias Böttger (architect, raumtaktik), Ellen Blumenstein (curator, The Office), Max Schumacher (director, post theater), as well as by Andrea Hofmann, Frauke Gerstenberg, and Jan Liesegang (raumlaborberlin).

From 10 p.m. on:
raumlabor music department		      
           
           
           
         
         
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