Ruin Academy

Transcription

Good day,today I want to talk to you about new spaces for knowledge and education and alternative spaces if you look around where we are now, this is sort of the model I'll be talking about and it's a new non-traditional way of receiving information you don't go to school in traditional knowing of I'm gonna go through this level and this is what I'm gonna get We're in an old city and this is just landed in the middle and now it's feeding you knowledge about the future of vehicles, the future of gardening, the power of makers I'm gonna talk about education as a project and how important it is to look at education as a major agent in making the future and it has always been this urge of artist, maker of revolution to change old ways in order to make the new, you have to change the pattern of thinking and to change that pattern, you have to make new schools and we all know when we look around when we look at this world there is not a linear way to learn There's not this thing that'll get you in one path There's all these little bits and pieces we gather in this wider context and what I suggest is when we look outside, when we look our cities what if our city was giving us answers for questions we were asking what if the cities contain tools we already need to make the change This is a project that I work on in San Francisco since I was there in 2006 With a collective of rebar that was kind of a gathering of artists,landscape designers the concept here was when the city was in crisis in 2008, there was no construction Why can't the city give us the tools they have laying around? Why can't they teach us to make our own cities? Why can't we make our own bicycles with the tools they already have? Why can't we find something that we can use in order to make our dreams happen This is sort of a carnival of make yourself, do yourself, dig under the ground, see how your city build learn your city, learn from it and we also have representatives from the government here and they are looking to us for answers so we propose this kind of ridiculous carnivals, do it yourself, take the tools they say, well, you know, we don't have much money but we have this place that we've been thinking about changing a bit because of the bureacracy and lack of money what we have is maybe this, can you use this and we give you some money can you make something happen? and we make this a temporary space that create this kind of rescue from the traffic that brings some green space that it's cheap, it's a task, we're doing something you know, can it lead to something, we don't know, but we're gonna watch whether the people are gonna come, whether the people are gonna love it whether they gonna take ownership of the space, and if they are, the city is watching us and they're seeing there's actions, activities, that people love it so maybe in the next 5 years they'll give more money to other people, to create this kind of spaces city give us old parking meters, we made a sculpture and this sort of iniatives were popping up everywhere in the city in the moment of crisis in the moment of economy being low what does that tell you? That we can take advantage of any situation we just have to really know the context we're in. This is a project that uses temporary space on this big lot that'll become a multi-residential new space But why not use it for a farm for 3 years Why not teach the people the ways that what we're talking about today, the empowerment Why can't we gather, build a community, plant the seeds, learn how to do all these things if you remember the illustration I showed you in the beginning, this ridiculous, let's drive the machine dig up the city, well, it happend, you know, a year or later in a way it was a surprise to us, somehow deep inside we knew that if you initiate the change, it leads to something you just gotta try and do and also for me, symbol of self for empowerment as a bicycle In Shanghai I saw a lot of bicycles Here, I haven't been here long enough This is a bicycle music festival that I participated to us, to this big group of people that put together, the musicians it's a self empowerment symbols we take them music through symbols, we take the music through the cities but not even not, we have empowered the sound we give all the sound to all the speakers to ourselves it take 7 people to power a giant band and this image represents to me, this combination of the few efforts that we brought together the pedal power music, the pedal, the lighting, the square that was once, you know, hustling with traffic and this is all made by efforts of the few people who are wanting to change something and what I represent today is Strelka Institute, and I come from Moscow which I don't know how many of you know much about it's a big city, it's a huge city, it's growing, it's becoming out of control it is out of orders, and what the city is really trying to do is grow but how does the city grow, who makes it grow,is it the government, are we looking to government for answers? we don't really know, this is where the institute is situated right in the center, in an old factory that used to make chocolate, now it's a creative cluster and it was founded by a board of trustees but only in Russia is this possible and there's this kind of spirit in Russia where you have to find an opportunity and if you do, you jump on it These people saw an opportunity and creating a new square, urban planning and there is this whole missing level of layer of people who can speak the language of the govenment and connect them to designers architects, it's privately funded by these people and they contacted the rancohouse in the first year, who if you know, architects in the leading practitioners in urban design and architecture So he created this program, the school on the parallel effort, there's this interesting dynamic of spreading to these different directions There's a consultancy that's developing There's a publishing house, introducing books on urbanism that Russia has been missing because of all different reasons you might know that we've been blocked off from the world for a long time we didn't know much about the problems of the city, urbanism, the kind of humanistic approach the public space, all this discourse is going on in the 60's and the growing cities and U.S., Europe, for example so now we're republishing the old works and introducing the language of urbanism to Russia and to top it off, we have a really popular bar so bar, is one of the hubs for young people to come together, to also attract the energy just like this space, you know, you have the bypassers, the people who walk by and they might come in, they might get this part of the knowledge and the bar is similar, it's so close to the institute, it intertwine together so it attracts this kind of visitors that might not know something about, but get interested the heart of the space is really the open courtyard which is a public space, and it introduces a series of events in summer where it opens up for all the public that it invites experts from all over the world, to talk about issues of urbanism, public space, growing cities, data, that we can now gather, and also economists, historians, political experts that tell us about the context of Russia the topics range, and there's is this multi discipline areas that introduces that just one way of thinking but all these ways of thinking combine together there's theme that really of course, architecture, urbanism, but the topic of Moscow is really one main theme that we're noticing the reason is because Moscow is changing and what is happening in Moscow is the mayor has changed the one has built the city for the last decade we have this new, not new government, new people, young people in the government who are wanting the new wanting the city to grow in certain way but they are looking for answers from people we have no people to tell them what we want so Strelka is in part responsible for creating this dialogue the dialogue on changing Mosco and the change is happening in Moscow We're branding the change We're participating in big Moscow compeition which is the expansion of Moscow, the smart growth of Moscow putting out to the public, the books, the publishing that I was talking about also putting together Moscow urban forum for the second year which is a first attempt to introduce to the government, the discourse because the government is very close to the institution and they do not, they are not always eager to hear, you know, the experts, the international speakers but here, we bring them together for 3, 4 days and they're able to get into discussion, dialogue and this is the way we learn, we learn through dialogue and discussion Strelka is gonna be the one to put together the Russian pavilion for 2014 Venice Biennale so it's a big opportunity to introduce to its discourse and of course educational program, which feeds the brain and the heart of institute it's only 37 students this year most of the time it's 38, 40 students an international crowd of researchers, professionals,journalist, economists geographers, I'm an architect, and it's a mixture that create for 9 months we come together in this very intense program together it's a series of workshop, simulators, discussions, forums and they teach us , really, at the end of summer reduce this critical outlook on what we on the problems that Moscow faces future of Moscow and the problem that it exists now the international students really add to the discourse because we all introduce different perspectives of course there's lots of Russians because the discourse in Russia But think of all these people from Columbia, China, Greece, India that come to Russia and look at Moscow with fresh eyes, and they offer new perspectives There's expertise in different fields and becoming more disciplinary which we all work in different groups with each other really listen to each other to understand how we think because nobody thinks the same, we're all different and then the program leads to summer events so all the findings during the year we can all reintroduce in the events we can lead the workshops that we will with our educational studios we will lead this year of workshops for the public these are series of workshops in the past that really range from art, media, design, architect, urbanism we also have this important factor, and this I think, one of the reason why I'm here is this geographic field trip, this year we went to Shanghai, the founder of the school really believe that the school has to be about playing and it has to be different, you know, it can't not be based on traditional institution not only they pay us to be there through the year, but they also pay for our trips they pay for our field trips to investigate but we are responsible for the outcomes, responsible for the contents so for example, I put together Moscow Shanghai Urban Forum with Richard and we introduced this topic of microcity the power of networks and we created this forum that brought together leading professionals, activists, designers, who are really doing something in Shanghai and they were able to share with us what they are doing, what are their problems what is the issues they're dealing and talk to us so in a way, this is also an urban forum that I help put together in Moscow which we talk to government, also to activists and architects, and how do we talk to each other what is the language we use, when the activists talk to the government what is the pathway he can reach the government and how should he do it, what is the languague so in a way we are teaching, and we are being taught, how to be agent of change how to introduce change into our environment and how to follow it up how to make it a more social city, how to awaken how to have an intuition to see this change in coming and also engage and be a part of it these are the themes this year that are current in Moscow, it is everywhere we're looking into the future but we do not want to forget about our past we want to gather all these datas, becoming really prevalent with digital communications and all the things and we talk about how to use these datats to inform the growing of the cities we want to talk about the pattern of cohabitation, all the post Soviet landscape we're left with, which is mass sea of housing and how do we introduce a human element to the socialists, this landscape and the project I'm working on is education as a project and how do we look at past of educaiton, what it is now and what are the things the learning is going to become in the future of course we look at self education all the way we look at institutions, the current state of institutions, I'm looking at problems of mobilities which in Russia is really prevalent because what happens is periphery empties all the people, and they go to all the big towns to study to the best university that leave us with empty periphery, with a small town that's really asking for help so I'm looking at ways we can introduce some sort of educational component into the periphery, into the regions and interestingly, I come here, and this kind of maker movement, and this networking if you see, this map I created before I came here, before I knew you, before I landed in this historic forum, this kind of agent This is the network that she was talking about if we can make consistent to connect to other cities what if there's one here, can we connect to Russia, can we create an independent system that functions and makers, yes, to meet also represents this kind of energy behind the activism behind the ecology that we talk about let's take things back into our hands let's realize we don't need a middle man, an agent in between, we can make it ourselves you know, we can talk to the government once we start making it, maybe they will help us this is a maker kind of initiatives but all it really started with was one man one man really led to this and what if we make this make lab mobile that we can travel with it, what if we give people tools to actually affect their own environment what if they make, here's the tools, here's the new generation what if they make stuffs for the cities what if they look at the city as a playground why can't they play in their city so as our studios, this is one of the finishing part of our manifesto but we confront the urgency and fuel the demand for new model of education we pledge to be open, critical and rigorous we're not afraid to fail we will make space for trials and new discoveries and the answers may exist between the lines so this is Strelka, this is the website and I'm really happy to be here, thank you very much.