ROSKILDEARRIVING IN AN ALIEN LANDSCAPE
Invited by PUBLICWORKS to take up residence as part of it’s new stage for utopia 'exploring the commons' at Europe’s largest festival outside of Glastonbury; we arrived at Roskilde with plenty of idea’s, but little knowledge of our audience and landscape.
The Public Works designed pavilion, poetically named FLOKKR, invited practitioners from across the globe to come together and explore the concept of commoning. Acting as a summer school, inside a festival, it would be open for the audience to come and get involved in more practical workshops, listen to talks, and discuss the collective language of commoning.
But as the gates opened, the festival was flooded with an already soaked and definitely pissed audience. We quickly saw how our initial intention to run a series of ‘classes’, with varying levels of in-depth participation, wouldn’t be inviting for the loose, short attention spans we had around us.
Adapting we devised a new, simpler, collective weaving workshop. The drop in workshops took little explaining and our quickly fashioned looms were the perfect meeting place for 2 or more friends, or strangers, to come together and engage in an act of repetitive design meditation. The festival rugs took advantage of one daily discarded resource at the festival, rubbish.
STORIES AND MEETINGS WOVE THEMSELVES INTO THE FABRIC OF THE FESTIVAL.
Making use of the too often discarded materials at the festival was a great way for us and the participants to map the site, clear up, and collectively engage in a creative task that required no prior knowledge, but gave new skills and grew relationships with each new woven piece.
Our research into the creation of a knowledge commons on site was still useful, but taking a practical approach first meant that these topics and themes arose naturally during the workshops. The rubbish festival rugs became legacy objects that not only trapped an essence of the festival, they held stories, meetings, jokes and inspirations from stranger to friend.
The project was supported by Public Works, and Roskilde.
THE HANDMADE RUGS WOVE TOGETHER STORIES AND RUBBISH TO CREATE THE UNIQUE FESTIVAL FURNISHINGS.
In 2017 we were asked by the Growing Manual to submit a blueprint entailing some of our process. As a means to analyse the project through collaborative reflection we made a blueprint, first of our failures in this project, then with the success that grew out of us reacting to the situation. Below is a blueprint that shows our initial thinking before arriving at Roskilde (in grey) and our new blueprint for engagement and communication in similar situations (blue). The pink shows the thinking that occured between the two.
A BLUEPRINT FOR SHARING MISTAKES
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