5 Johanna Roth The supermarket is one of the most frequented architectures of our time, an everyday stage where belonging is continuously negotiated. Both intimate and anonymous, local and global, commercial and communal, it structures routines, desires, and encounters. This workshop re-appropriates the supermarket as a multi-layered spatial construct, asking: How can we reframe its logics of circulation, display, and ritual? How can longing transform consumption into connection? Rather than designing solutions, the workshop embraces the supermarket as a paradoxical site. Through mapping, re-staging, and performative experimentation, students will uncover hidden structures, routines, and exclusions that shape belonging. By shifting the lens from problem-solving to problem-finding, we ask: What social desires and longings lie beneath the surface of consumption? What spaces of encounter are overlooked, what rituals forgotten? The aim is to generate awareness and speculative possibilities rather than definitive answers. Antwerp, with its historic role as a trading hub and one of Europe’s largest ports, is a city where global and local scales intersect. Flows of goods and food arrive through its port before reappearing in supermarkets. The supermarket becomes the everyday echo of the port, where planetary logistics are translated into shelves, aisles, and shopping baskets. Situating this workshop in Antwerp highlights how belonging is entangled with histories of trade, migration, and cultural exchange, as well as with the intimate act of shopping for bread, spices, or rice. The approach is interdisciplinary, combining architecture, art, and performance. Methods include spatial mapping, speculative prototyping, and ephemeral interventions, alongside performative exercises using food as scenography. Food here is not only sustenance, but a cultural signifier and socialcatalyst. Over the week, participants will transform the supermarket into a space of imagination, culminating in a public dérive where the supermarket becomes both exhibition and stage, collapsing the boundaries between shopping, meeting, and performing.
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