Workshops
Laboratory Workshop in Urban Recycling
Architect Santiago Cirugeda creates a Laboratory of Urban Recycling, focusing specifically on the transformation of a former industrial space into a new space for cultural and social use.
This workshop employs dynamics of collective creation to carry out a project that transforms the space of the former adoberías de Vic into a new social and cultural project for the city. Adoberías is a highly valuable and meaningful enclave in Vic whose building has unfortunately become increasingly dilapidated in recent years. This workshop’s main challenge, and the peculiarity that makes it especially interesting, is the effort to construct a forum in which the academic world and social networks meet, collaborate and work together, sharing knowledge and personal effort to carry out a real undertaking: rehabilitating the ruins of a singular building that is part of Vic’s heritage and developing a socio-cultural project there.
The essential elements for meeting this goal are, in our opinion, active participation and, from the very start, participation in the workshop by representatives of different associations and collectives in Vic. To make this possible, a series of sessions has been proposed as a means of identifying existing needs, proposals for recovery, possible management models, and groups interested in the recovery of the Adoberías. This part of the work will be open in character and will be carried out in the evenings by representatives of the city’s social collectives.
After finalizing the workshop, Santiago Cirugeda commented: “collective creation is an approach to constructing, imagining, designing and making things that is neither new nor exclusively limited to the arts and architecture, although it does constitute options for more socialized actions. It values the individual in relation to the group, implants approaches, frees and multiplies people’s creative capacities, brings the capacity to negotiate into play and calls for a balance of listening, proposing and doing. What is new about its contribution to artistic contexts is that it does not focus on the viewer as a consumer, but instead, it allows him or her to participate in a process that combines conception and execution, and to become one of the creators in the context of a mechanism for co-production that both dissolves and erases the idea—and the role—of the creator as an isolated individual, stressing instead collaborative structures in which various creators share responsibility.”
