ENTERING COMMONS

Acquiring crafts and creative skills through the process of building mobile sitting furniture, while exchanging perspectives on shared urban habitat. The workshop was executed with help of Eileen Lampert. It lasted a month and was initiated as part of the '21 summer school of Schlesische 27, an intercultural youth integration institution in Berlin. Its aim was to give young people the opportunity to get in touch with wood working tools and the creative process, in order for them to acquire crafts skills and gain perspectives for their further education. ​ As a result three mobile pieces of sitting furniture were developed and built out of scrap material from the urban surrounding. Those can now be used to explore and temporarily alter hidden or transit areas of public space to ones own need or liking. ​ At the core of the workshop approach lies the understanding of humans as creative beings with the ability to shape their living situation according to their own ideas. This radically empowering conception of creativity is inspired by the work of Joseph Beuys, who propagated it as a prerequisite condition to any democratic aspiration. ​ Following some of such thoughts that were developed as part of former project 'Social Design Thinking', the concept encouraged the participants to reflect on what they consider their personal habitat – the local environment in which they live and with which they interact. In this particular case focus was laid on those parts of each one's living space, that are accessible for everybody, since they equally belong to all members of society – so called 'commons'.