29 August - 7 September 2014
MKC and various locations around The City of Skopje
download the INFO BROCHURE SKOPJE SCH2014
view the INFO BROCHURE SCH2014/SKOPJE
SKOPJE CREATIVE HUB (SCH) is a 10 day long creative festival which focuses on developing interventions that promote alternative use of public space. SCH has paired international and local young creative professionals to run workshops together with groups of students. The invited thinkers, activists and theorists will provide a critical discourse on city space through а series of public discussions. SCH is intended to grow into a network of creative professionals, a reservoir of fresh ideas on urbanity, with a shared knowledge database.
The festival is consisted of three parts:
Workshops - total of 5 groups - that will design and produce urban interventions in public space. Each group has 10-15 international students, of different creative disciplines, who will be guided by tutors.
Discussions - series of public debates on activating, performing and experimenting with public spaces. We invited guests from Macedonia, the region and Europe.
Parallel program - performances, one day actions, theater plays, exhibitions, presentations by local artists and activists, concerts etc.
1. WORKSHOP - GROUPS:
CONSTRUCTING A STAGE
The idea for the stage came from the local ad-hoc theater groups that need a place for performance. The stage is a reaction to the overall lack of public space initiatives in Skopje and creates a place where freedom of expression is imperative. It is placed near the Youth Cultural Center (MKC) in the center of Skopje, but still in a very underdeveloped area along the river Vardar. The stage will be multifunctional, open-wooden structure, preferably mobile/modular and easily adapted to host small concerts, public gatherings of any kind, talks, forums. Ensamble from Zurich, whose wooden pavilions have been awarded many times, will guide the students together with the local set designer Elena Dinovska and RadiUs Architects.
Phase 1: "Designing a Brief"; 29 August - 7 September 2014: Research on Material and Resources, Local Construction and Craft and Site Survey
Phase 2: "Constructing a Stage"; Late Autumn: Constructing and Building the Stage
Tutors: Ensamble (Zurich); RADiUs Architects (Skopje); Elena Dinovska (Skopje)
THE BICYCLE URBANISM UNIT
Skopje has grown immensely in the last years, boulevards were widened, green spaces diminished, number of cars doubled and there is decreasing space for pedestrians and cyclists. Booming Skopje has not yet considered an integral mobility strategy including all layers of society and celebrating active transport as potential for urbanization. This is the starting point for the Bicycle Urbanism Unit in Skopje.
The Bicycle Urbanism Unit will employ the humble bicycle to connect Skopje’s urbanization to a human scale. The Bicycle Urbanism Unit will work in a performative way, with subjective urban views, in cooperation with Skopje’s population and urban administration, with manual and digital tools. The Bicycle Urbanism Unit will draw experiential maps of the city, reclaim public space currently occupied by the car and develop a bicycle urbanism vision for Skopje. The participants of this group will work with NaTochak and Smarter Than Car. Together they will develop an alternative urbanistic vision for Skopje based on a non-motorized angle on the city.
Tutors: Florian Lorenz - Smarter Than Car (STC, Vienna/Beijing); NaTochak (Skopje)
RETHINKING SKOPJE: IDENTIFYING URBAN TOOLS
The diversities in the city (social, ethnic, national, cultural) present great potentials for development of places for inclusion, coexistence and interaction. We will combine qualitative and quantitative spatial research methods on different scales in order to identify spatial potentials. The potentials will be rethought and activated through strategic tools and scenario-based proposals in close contact with citizens, NGOs, local authorities and innovative start-up companies. The material (graphic, textual, audio and video) will feed into an online platform that documents the research and activation process. The final outcome will be a combined interactive web-platform where the results of this and the other 5 groups will be compiled and published in this digital database as a platform for further collaborations.
Tutors: Haris Piplas - Urban Think Tank (ETH Zurich); Marko Icev (Skopje)
PUBLIC PLAYGROUNDS
The public playgrounds are urban installations which react to the lack of initiatives for activating open spaces in Skopje. The installations are smart, small, highly visible and point out at possible scenarios for alternative use of public space. Every project that ProstoRož develop raises new questions and findings. They believe that each location demands a different approach. In Skopje they will test an approach inspired from their interaction with the city together with the local architect Ivana Kostovska and the renowned artist Velimir Zernovski. The public playgrounds are places that invite and provoke interaction based on personal interpretations of the public space. The interventions will be made from various materials (wood, metal, plastic, glass, paint) and in various mediums (visual, spatial, audio).
Tutors: Maša Cvetko - ProstoRož (Ljubljana); Ivana Kostovska (Skopje); Velimir Žernovski (Skopje/Belgrade)
INSTRUCTIONAL GRAPHIC DESIGN: FROM- AND FOR- THE CITY
For and From the City is a workshop based on a set of instructions created by the workshop leader Neda Firfova, which are to be filtered through its participants interpretations. The process of work proposes that the participants of this workshop are to become the SCH documentarists, who gather, archive and document spoken word content in the form of word lists. They are to become satellite members of all the other groups for certain periods of time, in which they will observe, filter and edit word content related to the Skopje public space, in real time. After creating a Skopje specific word archive, they will interpret parts of it typographically and set them in the exhibition space. They will be further designed to become pages of the book that follows the event. The workshop's aim is to emphasize the graphic designer's role as an organized content producer and a dynamic part of a whole.
Tutor: Neda Firfova (Skopje/Tokyo)
2. DISCUSSION – GUESTS:
Prof. Philip Ursprung (gta/ETH Zurich)
Prof. Tadej Glažar (Faculty of Architecture, Ljubljana)
Prof. Lieven de Cauter (University of Lueven)
Prof. Mechtild Widrich (Basel)
Dubravka Sekulić (Belgrade/Zurich)
Maša Cvetko (ProstoRož, Ljubljana)
Nemanja Zimonjić and Guillaume Othenin Girard (Ensamble, Zurich)
Florian Lorenz (Smarter Than Car/PlanSinn, Vienna)
Roel van Herpt and Giulio Margheri (Strelka Institute, Moscow)
Bekim Ramku (KAF, Prishtina)
Haris Piplas (Urban Think Tank/ETH, Zurich)
Marko Icev (Skopje)
Jasna Stefanovska (Skopje/Ljubljana)
Dijana Vučinić (DVARP, Podgorica)
Damjan Kokalevski and Milan Dinevski (CCN - City Creative Network, Skopje)
3. PUBLIC PROGRAM:
Tiiiit Inc. - Radio drive, Intimately mapping the City
FRIK - Visual art/music/performance, Film projection
SAM - Skate Association of Macedonia, Multifunctional skate inspired objects/space
MOF/YEF - Youth Educational Forum - Banks Raises Palaces, Youth performance
Marta Mojsova - Reuse stage design for MOF's performace
NaTochak - Critical mass, Bicycle act
IZLEZ- Student group presentation
CAC Skopje - The Contemporary Art Center, Mobile gallery project
ACSC – Autonomous Cultural and Social Center Skopje, ACSC project
CENTRAL HUB - MKC - Youth Cultural Center - Skopje
The festival is supported by: Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, Youth Cultural Center Skopje and The City of Skopje.
* All results from the festival will be published in a book, made available online at www.citycreative.net and presented at the BIO 50, Biennale for Industrial Design Ljubljana, one of the oldest and most important biennials of this kind in Europe.
CURATORS:
Milan Dinevski & Damjan Kokalevski
ORGANIZER:
SUPPORTERS:
The City of Skopje
