FACILITIES: Practices of world’s co-(de)construction

Workshops for Scuola Popolare, Villa Romana Florence (Italy), June and July 2021


Facilities are un-problematised socio-material assemblages that compose the backbone of our interaction with the world. The participants to the workshop that TAB and Codesign Toscana have organized at Scuola Popolare for Villa Romana have been invited to look at them as symbols of what appears as ‘already given’, while their components, the processes that keep them alive, the manpower and the cultural work that sustains them remains unseen. Via a performative approach rooted in a relational and post-humanistic sensibility, we have engaged with the complexity of the interactions that lie at the core of our being able to bring these facilities to life: be they either part of our domestic, everyday sphere (such as a telephone,  a speaker, a phone) or the collective one (a neighbourhood, a city, a metropolitan area). The exercise we have designed did not limit itself to a deconstructing phase, but it also included an imaginative reconstructive process.