21 Alexandra Sonnemans Michiel Huijben How do longing and belonging take shape in the spaces we inhabit and share? This workshop invites participants from all disciplines to approach the city itself— its buildings, thresholds, and forgotten corners —as a field of traces where desires, exclusions, and encounters are inscribed. Working directly within the urban environment, we treat the site as a 1:1 laboratory: a space to learn from by working in it. Through walking, mapping, tracing, and constructing, participants explore how architectural elements —walls, columns, passages, ornament — can be reinterpreted and transformed into new constellations of meaning. The body is our primary instrument: to measure, to touch, to act, to imagine. At its core, the workshop seeks to identify and test ways in which architecture can become a tool for reclaiming agency over one’s living environment. By engaging physically and imaginatively with the built world, participants develop spatial experiments that assert a sense of belonging within places often defined for us rather than by us. The workshop draws inspiration from Doreen Massey’s understanding of space as a relational field – a dynamic sphere of encounters and becoming rather than a fixed entity. Our method uses tools and instruments from a variety of fields – including, but not limited to, architecture, visual arts and performing arts – to continuously shift between thinking, doing, and reflecting. By alternating these modes, students gain a layered understanding of space and its possibilities. The process is iterative and collective: rather than aiming for a polished end result, we build knowledge through experiments, traces, and encounters. What remains is not only the work itself, but also the visible archive of attempts, failures, and re-imaginings. Phases: 1. Exploring. On-site observations, archival fragments, personal rituals and stories. Mapping visible and invisible traces of longing and belonging. 2. Experimenting. At 1:1 scale, students intervene through drawings, temporary structures, colours, and performative gestures. These ephemeral architectures open new ways of experiencing space. 3. Anchoring. The most generative experiments are further developed into a collective installation. The site becomes a palimpsest of desires and relations: both historically rooted and oriented towards futures and imaginaries. Result: A shared, site-specific installation: a spatial drawing of longing and belonging that is at once process, archive, and proposition. A temporary landscape where new meanings, relations, and possibilities of common space emerge.
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