SPATIALISTS: THE MANIFESTO
(Become 1 in 10 simple steps)
Conventionally conceived architectural/urban spaces no longer communicate. Created places no longer bear enough meaning; they have lost profoundness and dimensions. They are predominantly created merely as images, emptied forms, or at the very best – simply as ambients. In any case, the potential of a place to be multidimensional, to be rich in meaning and layers has been neglected.
Places have become not silent, but mute, and we owe them to regain their voices, their sounds. We are not performers. Yet, we deeply believe in the power of performance and the performative nature of the world we live in. Performance remains one of the rare tools of meaningful and rewarding communication in the Everyday saturated with information. It forces us to be aware of the here and the now. To listen to what is being said, to think about what is being shown and to remember what is being seen. In order to make our work communicative and effective, we make it performative.
We work with space. Interested to deeply understand it we ACT in it, challenging it to CO-ACT with us. Through this action, we create places of every scale – from a microcosmos to a whole world. Places that tell stories. Places that communicate with their users, in both physical and metaphysical way. Places that affect you in a way a human would.
In order to do so, we borrow from the performing arts and other correlating disciplines, thus defining a dynamic, interdisciplinary field for research and further creation. Still, there are rules for this borrowing. And if you plan on borrowing, remember:
1. You are not an artist. And that is OK.
2. Be firmly rooted in your primary discipline. Feel it, understand it and detect whether
there exist problems in it.
3. Seek, explore and accept tools, methods, strategies and tactics of the other
disciplines. Borrow what you intuitively find tempting to help you handle the defined
problems.
4. Have criteria! Borrow only what you feel you can use.
5. Bring new resources to your primary field. Apply the knowledge. Improve your
work.
6. Reconnect the theory and the practice: Theoretically define your practical work, then
test in practice what you have defined in theory: it’s a reversible process.
7. Rethink. Requestion. Readjust. Flexibility is the only way to progress.
8. Collaborate. But carefully choose your collaborators.
9. If you plan on working with space, be gentle – space remembers.
10. If you plan on borrowing, quote Godard.