The exhibition gravitates around one simple question: what is your ideal city like? In an attempt to respond to this question, the exhibition “Twelve Cautionary Urban Tales” takes its inspiration from the project “Twelve Cautionary Tales for Christmas”, by the group of architects Superstudio, first published in 1971 in Architectural Design. It was a series of twelve short stories, each accompanied by a single illustration, conjuring the image of twelve proposals of ideal cities.
This time a group of contemporary practices, from different generations and a range of professional expertises, have been invited to reconceptualize the original Superstudio format and transform the exhibition into a tool that helps us rethink our role in the construction of the city. These new fables, as if emerging from the pages of a book, have the intention of questioning what we understand as ‘city’, and thus, help us to reimagine what the city could become —as that space where relations, nature, bodies, and geographies coexist.
Each one of these practices tells a fable in the form of an artistic installation, creating a series of narratives open to various readings. The stories raised in this exhibition can help to problematize and question the conventional definition of "city", revealing through its fables, new and different ways of inhabiting the world. The fact that it is impossible to give one single definition of what a city is provides a wealth of diverse, even divergent interpretations, which are primarily social constructs.
INVERTED TENTS by Aristide Antonas.
It proposes setting out a system of tents suspended from the ceilings of buildings, introducing a new set of regulations to inhabit these small individual spaces. The most important part of Inverted Tents is not the way these tents are inhabited, but rather the space generated around them, where new ways of collectively satisfying its inhabitants’ basic needs must be found. It is an oneiric story where we see a city becoming empty despite being completely equipped for occupation.
QUEERING THE CITY: A SONO-ORIENTATION by Katayoun Arian, along with artists Angela Anderson, Irene Cassarini, Karachi Beach Radio, and Gayatri Kodikal.
A sound installation with a range of works by artists invited by Katayoun Arian. Its content and connections are subject to rhythmic formations and deformations, including everyday sounds, speculative storytelling, variations of what is understood as noise, and even an immersion into the ultrasonic. The installation challenges the binary logic of the ‘urban’, which usually implies the existence of some kind of exterior to the city, when in fact these limits between the interior and the exterior of the city do not exist.
THE GRAND INTERIOR: TOWARDS THE DIFFUSE HOME by MAIO Architects.
MAIO Architects investigate how digital technologies are transforming our lives and everyday environments, looking in particular at the impact of using artificial intelligence systems, in domestic spaces. Here, the house is not simply an isolated space but part of a wider system where the boundaries between the public and private sphere, urban and domestic, are blurred. The whole city is part of the domestic realm, redefining and blurring the boundaries of the house and making the domestic generic, a diffuse territory in continuous expansion.
3 WANDERS AND 2 STROLLS by Clara Nubiola.
The proposal tells us about a Madrid that stands in contrast and coexists with that of its historic neighbourhoods, human flows, urban planning of the past, and the local stores that have been there forever; the old landscape “inside”. In a simple yet immensely poetic way, five rolls of kraft paper, ten-metres-long each, transform into a story, a tale where “the outside” and “that inside” overlap, switch, and form that city without clear boundaries. A city like any other, where the landscape creates the path. Where paths create landscapes.
THE ATOM PEOPLE by Traumnovelle Léone Drapeaud, Manuel León Fanjul y Johnny Leya.
This is a story that happens in a post-apocalyptic world, where the planet has overheated to the point of becoming uninhabitable. Confronted with this emergency, humanity has created a new underground city, keeping themselves alive thanks to a machine that produces infinite energy, allowing its inhabitants to develop their normal activities. This fable, based on the machine-city, questions the paradox of contradictory relations that occur in nature when it is born from the search of ecology through technological means, becoming manifest in a sublime desperation of not belonging to the ecosystems of our own planet.
THE PARLIAMENT OF PLANTS by Studio Céline Baumann.
This is the sixth ‘Queer Nature’ project by Céline Baumman, where she proposes an urban environment where the wisdom of plants is highly valued, where the flora is on equal terms as the humans inhabiting the planet. The Parliament of Plants gives voice to the botanic world, addressing issues of race, gender, and normativity from an intersectional perspective. With similar protocols to those currently used in the legislative arena, in this parliament of vegetation, plant legislators from different origins convene on a daily basis to debate current issues.
THE POLITICS OF FOOD: A RADICAL NEW FOOD SYSTEM FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE CITY by Chloé Rutzerveld.
With this project the designer and artist proposes a new and radical food system for post- Anthropocene cities. She takes us to the year 2050, where the food and the systems of production, distribution, and preparation we know today no longer exist. Technology allows us to design and experience forms of nutrition beyond our imagination, where food poverty and waste are a thing of the past, and agricultural lands have been restored to their previous native ecosystems. The Politics of Food shows six artefacts from a possible future food system based on the intake of microorganisms.
SELLING BRICKS by Antonio Giráldez López and Pablo Ibáñez Ferrera (Bartlebooth) in collaboration with Alberto de Miguel (horror.vacui).
Selling Bricks emerges from a audiovisual archiving project started in 2018, which to date is found in the form of an Instagram feed (@kellycorbusier) and a publication. In what we could think of as the third episode of this project, Bartlebooth and Alberto de Miguel (horror.vacui) present a range of ways of visualising, communicating, understanding, and thinking the city, all through urban music.
UNSETTLED URBANISM by Merve Bedir, Chong Suen and Sampson Wong.
This installation analyses “the city in movement” at a critical moment of protests and uprisings on a global scale, where one can talk about an unstable, restless, and untiring urbanism. There is no place here for heroic plans with the pretence of “saving the world”, the city is of the people and for the people. Here we have three fundamental aspects of a city in movement: technology as an accessibility hub for information, revolving around the use of smart phones, communication apps, and forums. Unsettled Urbanism is a call to understand how collective spatial intelligence is produced and the other ways of living the city that emerge.
COSMORAMA by Design Earth.
The project Cosmorama tries to answer the question of how to narrate and address the twenty-first century stories of the ‘New Space Age’, including the mining of asteroids, life in zero gravity, and space waste. Cosmorama proposes a series of projects for this ‘New Space Age’ in the form of three speculative fictions: “Mining the Sky”, “Planetary Ark”, and “Pacific Cemetery”. These (geo)stories visibilise issues and actors of great importance that have not been taken into account following the technological triumphalism and mainstream narratives of the space age.
THE VOICE OF CHILDREN by Assemble.
Assemble use The Voice of Children to explore child play and its potential in cities around the world. Basically a collection of film clips, shows us how free deep play is a biological need and a legal right, and is the best conduit for learning. Children can propose radical, imaginative, and diverse visions of the world. At a time of great economic and political vulnerability, we have a lot to learn from their capacity of navigating and participating in the project of “making city”. These film clips attempt to show how important the environment is in making play possible, as well as the creative, complex, and evolving relations children develop with the physical world when given enough space and time.
OUR HAPPY LIFE: ARCHITECTURE AND WELLBEING IN THE AGE OF EMOTIONAL CAPITALISM by CCA.
An exhibition that becomes here “an exhibition within the exhibition” with the intention of making us reflect on how a new “happiness agenda” impacts the way in which we inhabit our cities and, therefore, also on the way we conceive the cities of the future. Our Happy Life is a narrative anti-manual that explores and interprets the recent paradigms that shape our perception of our surroundings, giving a new identity to the notion of private space, reimagining our work environments, and transforming the planning of our cities.
This time a group of contemporary practices, from different generations and a range of professional expertises, have been invited to reconceptualize the original Superstudio format and transform the exhibition into a tool that helps us rethink our role in the construction of the city. These new fables, as if emerging from the pages of a book, have the intention of questioning what we understand as ‘city’, and thus, help us to reimagine what the city could become —as that space where relations, nature, bodies, and geographies coexist.
Each one of these practices tells a fable in the form of an artistic installation, creating a series of narratives open to various readings. The stories raised in this exhibition can help to problematize and question the conventional definition of "city", revealing through its fables, new and different ways of inhabiting the world. The fact that it is impossible to give one single definition of what a city is provides a wealth of diverse, even divergent interpretations, which are primarily social constructs.
INVERTED TENTS by Aristide Antonas.
It proposes setting out a system of tents suspended from the ceilings of buildings, introducing a new set of regulations to inhabit these small individual spaces. The most important part of Inverted Tents is not the way these tents are inhabited, but rather the space generated around them, where new ways of collectively satisfying its inhabitants’ basic needs must be found. It is an oneiric story where we see a city becoming empty despite being completely equipped for occupation.
QUEERING THE CITY: A SONO-ORIENTATION by Katayoun Arian, along with artists Angela Anderson, Irene Cassarini, Karachi Beach Radio, and Gayatri Kodikal.
A sound installation with a range of works by artists invited by Katayoun Arian. Its content and connections are subject to rhythmic formations and deformations, including everyday sounds, speculative storytelling, variations of what is understood as noise, and even an immersion into the ultrasonic. The installation challenges the binary logic of the ‘urban’, which usually implies the existence of some kind of exterior to the city, when in fact these limits between the interior and the exterior of the city do not exist.
THE GRAND INTERIOR: TOWARDS THE DIFFUSE HOME by MAIO Architects.
MAIO Architects investigate how digital technologies are transforming our lives and everyday environments, looking in particular at the impact of using artificial intelligence systems, in domestic spaces. Here, the house is not simply an isolated space but part of a wider system where the boundaries between the public and private sphere, urban and domestic, are blurred. The whole city is part of the domestic realm, redefining and blurring the boundaries of the house and making the domestic generic, a diffuse territory in continuous expansion.
3 WANDERS AND 2 STROLLS by Clara Nubiola.
The proposal tells us about a Madrid that stands in contrast and coexists with that of its historic neighbourhoods, human flows, urban planning of the past, and the local stores that have been there forever; the old landscape “inside”. In a simple yet immensely poetic way, five rolls of kraft paper, ten-metres-long each, transform into a story, a tale where “the outside” and “that inside” overlap, switch, and form that city without clear boundaries. A city like any other, where the landscape creates the path. Where paths create landscapes.
THE ATOM PEOPLE by Traumnovelle Léone Drapeaud, Manuel León Fanjul y Johnny Leya.
This is a story that happens in a post-apocalyptic world, where the planet has overheated to the point of becoming uninhabitable. Confronted with this emergency, humanity has created a new underground city, keeping themselves alive thanks to a machine that produces infinite energy, allowing its inhabitants to develop their normal activities. This fable, based on the machine-city, questions the paradox of contradictory relations that occur in nature when it is born from the search of ecology through technological means, becoming manifest in a sublime desperation of not belonging to the ecosystems of our own planet.
THE PARLIAMENT OF PLANTS by Studio Céline Baumann.
This is the sixth ‘Queer Nature’ project by Céline Baumman, where she proposes an urban environment where the wisdom of plants is highly valued, where the flora is on equal terms as the humans inhabiting the planet. The Parliament of Plants gives voice to the botanic world, addressing issues of race, gender, and normativity from an intersectional perspective. With similar protocols to those currently used in the legislative arena, in this parliament of vegetation, plant legislators from different origins convene on a daily basis to debate current issues.
THE POLITICS OF FOOD: A RADICAL NEW FOOD SYSTEM FOR THE ANTHROPOCENE CITY by Chloé Rutzerveld.
With this project the designer and artist proposes a new and radical food system for post- Anthropocene cities. She takes us to the year 2050, where the food and the systems of production, distribution, and preparation we know today no longer exist. Technology allows us to design and experience forms of nutrition beyond our imagination, where food poverty and waste are a thing of the past, and agricultural lands have been restored to their previous native ecosystems. The Politics of Food shows six artefacts from a possible future food system based on the intake of microorganisms.
SELLING BRICKS by Antonio Giráldez López and Pablo Ibáñez Ferrera (Bartlebooth) in collaboration with Alberto de Miguel (horror.vacui).
Selling Bricks emerges from a audiovisual archiving project started in 2018, which to date is found in the form of an Instagram feed (@kellycorbusier) and a publication. In what we could think of as the third episode of this project, Bartlebooth and Alberto de Miguel (horror.vacui) present a range of ways of visualising, communicating, understanding, and thinking the city, all through urban music.
UNSETTLED URBANISM by Merve Bedir, Chong Suen and Sampson Wong.
This installation analyses “the city in movement” at a critical moment of protests and uprisings on a global scale, where one can talk about an unstable, restless, and untiring urbanism. There is no place here for heroic plans with the pretence of “saving the world”, the city is of the people and for the people. Here we have three fundamental aspects of a city in movement: technology as an accessibility hub for information, revolving around the use of smart phones, communication apps, and forums. Unsettled Urbanism is a call to understand how collective spatial intelligence is produced and the other ways of living the city that emerge.
COSMORAMA by Design Earth.
The project Cosmorama tries to answer the question of how to narrate and address the twenty-first century stories of the ‘New Space Age’, including the mining of asteroids, life in zero gravity, and space waste. Cosmorama proposes a series of projects for this ‘New Space Age’ in the form of three speculative fictions: “Mining the Sky”, “Planetary Ark”, and “Pacific Cemetery”. These (geo)stories visibilise issues and actors of great importance that have not been taken into account following the technological triumphalism and mainstream narratives of the space age.
THE VOICE OF CHILDREN by Assemble.
Assemble use The Voice of Children to explore child play and its potential in cities around the world. Basically a collection of film clips, shows us how free deep play is a biological need and a legal right, and is the best conduit for learning. Children can propose radical, imaginative, and diverse visions of the world. At a time of great economic and political vulnerability, we have a lot to learn from their capacity of navigating and participating in the project of “making city”. These film clips attempt to show how important the environment is in making play possible, as well as the creative, complex, and evolving relations children develop with the physical world when given enough space and time.
OUR HAPPY LIFE: ARCHITECTURE AND WELLBEING IN THE AGE OF EMOTIONAL CAPITALISM by CCA.
An exhibition that becomes here “an exhibition within the exhibition” with the intention of making us reflect on how a new “happiness agenda” impacts the way in which we inhabit our cities and, therefore, also on the way we conceive the cities of the future. Our Happy Life is a narrative anti-manual that explores and interprets the recent paradigms that shape our perception of our surroundings, giving a new identity to the notion of private space, reimagining our work environments, and transforming the planning of our cities.
