Introduction
In the last years a.pass already organized seven Settlements in the program. Some were organized in our studio, some on location. Vladimir Miller proposed the Settlement as an open and collaborative research space that takes on different forms in different locations. This time he invites us for a slightly transformed Settlement at the Uferstudios in Berlin.
In short: a Settlement is a workspace that explores the relations between space, (artistic) practice, and the politics of the commons.
The basic practice of this collective set-up is to occupy together one large space and build everything required in that space from a common stock of materials to enable the individual practices. Next to providing the practitioner with the possibility to re-negotiate the spatial manifestations of his or her individual practice over the three weeks, the Settlement explores the potential of unstable architectures, the emergence and disappearance of property and territory in collective practice, and the agency of objects in establishing communal structure.
Following the idea that the material choices determine the set of possibilities of any given practice, for this episode the organizers would like to work with materials that are not chosen by them but are randomly gathered from already existing workspaces in Berlin. This choice is also informed by a raised awareness towards questions of sustainability within research environments. The material will thus be largely provided by artist and architects studio’s that will contribute objects and left-overs of previous practices, which will be used as a starting point for the project.
