The 7th Triennial for Design in Flanders 2013 is an investigation into the social relevance of design and the role and responsibility of designers in our society.
This Triennial is a forum for designers who wish to contribute to this public debate. Their work can be considered as essential as we are forced to live and act differently and to change our attitudes towards our natural resources.
Conflict is a starting point for designers to think about our society, to create content and significance within a design process and to produce sustainable and economically viable products.
Design application
in post-conflict rehabilitation
WORKSHOP 3 : workshop team : Ola-Dele Kuku, Martine De Maeseneer, Gideon Boie.
This workshop explores the dynamics of conflict and addresses the following questions: How can we define a conflict zone within a social structure? Is the conflict mechanism an integrated component of the structure of society? Can conflict be used to instigate or activate a progressive tendency? Destruction and devastation of the environment are the prominent aftermath in a conflict zones. How can design application in post-conflict rehabilitation encourage creative synthesis for innovative thinking for new design products and new spatial morphology?
‘The conflict culture’
As an integral component of the formation and evolution of a social system, conflict emerges as a significant mechanism that instigates change rather than unanimity. This phenomenon materializes in the form of various ‘vital events’ such as wars, natural disasters, emigrations, population displacements, birth, death, and choice. These events ultimately become the stimulators and variants in the transformation of societies.
The constitution and composition of a social system involve conflict as a process of modification towards a different future of experience. The evolution in contemporary culture is predominantly forged by conflict or ‘vital events’ which are instigating new conditions of adaptations and developments.
Understanding the conflict phenomenon as a catalyst of socio-cultural evolution, reveals that the notion is a familiar stimulant for improvement and progressive tendency. Therefore the accommodation of conflicts is a prominent objective within all aspects of social planning and intervention. This requires the ability to anticipate future events, the possibility of analysing and evaluating solutions, and the capacity for innovative thinking to derive satisfactory solutions.
With reference to wars, displacements and natural disasters, boundaries are constantly shifting and new territories are being created which underlines the discontinuity in development, function, and a non-sustainable administration. The consequential process of transition emphasizes new demographic patterns and controlling factors of disproportional concentration of population in specific areas.
These new territories have become the fundamental platforms for innovative solutions and interventions that require a continuous systematic approach.
What can you expect?
The 7th Triennial Design in Flanders in 2013 takes place in C-Mine Genk, opens on December, 14, 2013 and runs until March, 2, 2014. The partners in this project are Design Flanders, C-Mine Genk and Design Hub Limburg.
Kurt Vanbelleghem is Curator of the 7th Triennial Design in Flanders 2013
C-mine
C-Mine 10 bus 2, 3600 Genk
GPS-adres: Evence Coppéelaan 91, 3600 Genk
c-minebezoekersonthaal@genk.be
T:+32 (0) 89 65 44 90
Workshopteam
Ola-Dele Kuku is an architect and artist. He studied at the Southern Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles. His roots are in Nigeria, a country where he also lived for a relatively short period. He currently lives and works in Brussels. Ola-dele Kuku has given courses at the Milan Politecnico (Italy) and Delft University of Technology (Netherlands). He recently taught at the Tilburg Academy of Architecture (Netherlands). In 1995 he was awarded the Grand Prize – Prime Minister’s Prize during the IFI Nagoya International Design Competition and in 1997 he received the Public Prize in the VIZO’s Henry van de Velde Awards. More info on www.ola-delekuku.com
Martine De Maeseneer
MDMA l Martine De Maeseneer Architects has been around for 25 years of practicing, theorizing and teaching within an international forum of schools, colloquia and competitions. Two books appeared in conjunction with individual exhibitions: ‘The Indivisible Space’, Antwerp (1993) and ‘Ideality-3-Lost’, Brussels (1997). Their (first) public building of a certain scale, the Bronks Youth Theatre in the centre of Brussels, was in 2011 honoured as the first ever Belgian finalist in the European Mies van der Rohe Award for contemporary architecture. So far their journey followed a limited edition of realisations of private houses, office buildings, and social housing, all of them extensively published. Essays published (with such titles as ‘Aperitif Time’, ‘What Matters’ and ‘Parsing Traps’) have been adding up as chapters in a more substantial yet unpublished book. From 2001 to 2003 De Maeseneer took up a teaching job at the AA in London, and is currently a design unit master at Luca Brussels/Ghent. Within the practice there is a continous search for an expanded field of patterns, motives, logos, plots, timbres – trying to give architecture a countanance that draws upon ‘writing’. Ironically so, the choice made from the onset to theorize in a tradition of Venturi-Scott Brown, Aldo Rossi and Rem Koolhaas has refrained MDMA from building a lot.
Gideon Boie (1975, Bruges) is an architect-philosopher and runs, together with Matthias Pauwels, the cultural research and consultancy agency BAVO. Its core activities focus on the political dimension of art, architecture and urbanism. BAVO is located in Rotterdam, Brussels and Pretoria. More info on www.bavo.biz
Re-ACT by design
Held on the 7th of September 2016, ‘A Continuous State Of Time‘ is an interactive programme of lectures, debates and workshops on the contemporary phenomenon of conflict in architecture and art, in times of socio-cultural transformation. As an integral component of the formation and evolution of a social system, conflict emerges as a significant mechanism that instigates change rather than unanimity. This phenomenon materializes in the form of various vital events such as wars, natural disasters, emigrations, population displacements, birth, death, and choice. These events ultimately become the stimuli and variants in the transformation of societies.
Photo © Christian Carez
