Terra Insola is an architectural workshop taking place this summer (2013) in Crete, Greece. This workshop will have four areas of development: theoretical, computational, material fabrication and film documentation:
• Research (material in situ expertise, know-how, political and cultural involvements, rituals, literature, mythology, extraction-transformation, symbiosis)
• Process – computation (logic of aggregation, scattering, staggering, stacking, with variable components, on Rhino Grasshopper and Python scripting)
• Material experiment (prototyping, test of resisting and decay, strategy of construction, machinism and robotic developments)
• Report (photography, recordings and film / stop motion during all the process of construction)
Instructors: Francois Roche, Ezio Blasetti, Stephan Henrich, Camille Lacadee, Danielle Willems, Andreas Theodoridis, Lydia Kallipoliti
The daily experience of the workshop will be balanced between computation and hands-on work in situ (local knowledge, memories and know-how knitted with global tooling, computation and machinism) as exogeneous-endogeneous apparatuses. A machine will be designed dedicated to a non-repetitive component, which is able to be re-introduced as a non-standard process to create the geometry of a shell-ter (specific “agencements” and assemblage in the pursuit of the ceramic ornamentation of the Minos Castle, embedded in a computation procedure). This project (design, process, researches, documentation, construction, etc.) will entirely emerge from the collaborative work of our group, as a unique and engaged realization. Blurring the limits between students and instructors, we will define together a strategy of co-responsibility and co-authorship.
Scenario:
The barrier of Schengen was since a long time considered as a fortress. We did not remember exactly when this fence became for European citizen their own jail… inverting the preliminary reason of its constitution, to protect them against the world… Now it appears to be the revenge of an historical illusion. Out of this lost empire, out of this fortress maintaining the nostalgia of their late loftiness, life mutated into another system of negotiation, where a few people with the alibi of democracy are no longer deciding, through a populist delegation of power, the destiny of the others.
We heard that a small zone within the zone, located in a sort of fortress within the fortress is still a territory where the last “European” took refuge…
The main actor, a kind of Robinson Crusoe will construct his own escape from inside, as a topological inversion… similar to Boccaccio’s Decameron, in 1348, where a few people were exorcising the inevitable plague of the black death by an extra-vitalism of story-telling, between eroticism and tragedy…
The architectural project and the fictional d(m)ocumentary movie will be done by 20 students and 7 authors. We will report this anomaly… through an infiltration in this zone next June.
The movie and the construction are working as a retro-future report: Report from 2050
