Publication documenting a series of workshops involving Raumlabor, a
Berlin-based group architects, and the youths of Barca, a neighbourhood in
outskirts of Turin. The project, which advocates for the re-appropriation
of the
public space, saw
the development of a series of inhabitable
environmental
installations.
Cantiere Barca is an experimental art and architecture project
for public space that, between 2011 and 2013, involved dozens of people in
actions of construction and place-making under the guidance of the
architecture collective raumlaborberlin, in a neighbourhood at the
farthermost northeastern corner of the city of Turin. In the years of
endless crisis—in the economy, in politics, and in the environment—
Cantiere
Barca has fulfilled the demand for the identity and social
recognition of a group of residents, breathing life into a workshop of
shared creative practices and an exchange of knowledge, thus undertaking a
journey from the urban periphery to the MoMA in New York.
Cantiere
Barca is also a case study, which has witnessed both success and
failure, to ponder on the meaning of such concepts as collective,
community, the common good, participation, responsibility,
utopia,
and future.
Raumlabor is a Berlin-based group of 9 architects created in 1999. They work
at the intersections between
architecture,
city planning and art by means of
performative,
temporary interventions.
