Peter Lang, assistant professor of architecture at Texas A&M University, joined by four students from the Santa Chiara Study Center in Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy, where he teaches, recently participated in a major European architectural event in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
The April 22, 2008 presentation, “A Night of Provisional Futures,” was held at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAI). The event was part of a yearlong project, “Lost Highway Expedition,” in which a multitude of individuals, groups and institutions swarmed along the unfinished “Highway of Brotherhood and Unity” in the Western Balkans (former Yugoslavia). Along the way, the participating groups generated new projects, art works, networks and new architecture and politics based on the experience and knowledge they found along the highway. The project’s objective was to find and study missing relationships on the highway and look at them as a model for diverse Europe.
“The Western Balkans,” Lang said, “are to Europeans, what New Orleans and the Gulf Coast area devastated by Hurricane Katrina, are to Americans. Though in the Balkans, it was political upheaval and war rather than a natural disaster that created the problems the architectural community is rallying to address.”
The “Night of Provisional Futures” was a two-month “happening” at the NAI staged within a giant architectural space designed by Dutch Architect Wiel Arets. Over the course of 40 evenings, the participating artists and architects offered a glimpse into the future — the unknown, the fantastic and the commonplace — to see what cities might look like.
The collaborative work included processes and redefinitions that imagined the Western Balkans as a vital and important trigger for the possible futures of Europe. It followed the Lost Highway Expedition’s exploration of the cultural and urban landscapes of the Western Balkans, and was a part of the larger framework project know as “Europe Lost and Found.”
Within Arets’ giant installation, the artists used easel demonstrations, non-existing museums, provisional cars, nomadic mosques, always-to-be building sites, back to the future monuments, future telling and more improvised re-enactments to explore Europe’s provisional future.
Lang’s presentation was entitled, “Road Map to the Future.”
On Monday, May 12, Lang is traveling to the Balkans to participate in another provisional futures presentation at the Skuc Gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The event, “ How Soon is Now? — An Exercise to Imagine our Provisional Future,” aims to envision possible futures of cultural practices in the Western Balkans. It is focused specifically on a group of cultural practitioners who have been challenged and triggered by the region’s institutional breakdown during the 1990s and have become, often inadvertently, the forerunners or alternative models of cultural production.
“The event will also contribute to the ‘Lexicon of Provisional Futures,’ which actively seeks to encompass the terms and concepts that carry a potential to redefine the European city and its urban culture,” said Lang. “The emphasis is on thinking about the future ‘provisionally’ — to introduce both the necessary and instrumental margins of maneuverability with less utopist grandiloquence.”
A Night of Provisional Futures
http://www.europelostandfound.net/node/1042
Lost Highway Expedition
http://www.europelostandfound.net/
