The Organising Discourse archive, an independent postgraduate programme at Konstfack, University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, announces a lecture by Mariana Pestana titled Alternative Possible Worlds.
The lecture proposes thinking about how architecture and curatorship can use the relationship between reality and fiction to create discursive spaces. Pestana starts from the idea of “possible worlds” to ask whether a spatial intervention can generate, even if only for a moment, an alternative reality from which to look again at the existing world. The Universal Declaration of Urban Rights: Urban Parliament, by Zuloark, appears as a reference within the exhibition The Real and Other Fictions at the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, with photography by Luke Hayes. This shows how the Parliament continues to circulate two years after the Triennale, not only as a built project, but also as a curatorial reference for thinking about architecture, fiction and participation.
The lecture situates The Real and Other Fictions as an exhibition that works from the history of Palácio Pombal and commissions seven interventions by architects, artists and designers. Each of them proposes a fictional scenario, an alternative possible world to the one that exists outside the palace walls.
The Urban Parliament can be read as one of those architectures capable of producing a practicable political fiction. It does not represent an already existing institution: it rehearses another one. It gathers bodies, organises speech, makes conflict visible and transforms an exhibition room into a space where urban rights can be discussed.
Urban Rights actively participates in the international conversation on how architecture can stop reproducing what is considered “normal” and open temporary situations from which to imagine other forms of use, authority, participation and common life.
Programme: Organising Discourse Open Lectures. https://edu.konstfack.se/organisingdiscourse/mariana-pestana-ptuk-alternative-possible-worlds/
Lecture: Mariana Pestana, Alternative Possible Worlds
Venue: Konstfack, Stockholm