Open for Maintenance – Wegen Umbau geöffnet

– A Short Reflection Inspired by Shannon Mattern’s Foundational Essay “Maintenance and Care” (2018)

Ecological and economical sustainability are indivisible from a third, social dimension. Achieving a sustainable future for all will require transforming user behavior and readjusting the social relations between all parti cipants involved in spatial production—including the care workers tending to and maintaining the built fabric. To this end, architects will have to pay special attention to the heretofore neglected spaces and infrastructures enabling access to the most vulnerable groups in society. But they will also have to bolster the value of the mostly hidden yet indispensable care work main taining communities and institutions by centering the secluded spaces—from storage rooms for cleaning supplies to workshops, from material repositories to bathrooms to infrastructures for the main tenance of the urban fabric—as design challenges to be solved with care and attention.

– Photo essay by Giovanna Silva, from her series Veritas (on Venice), 2022

In the early morning hours, architect, photographer, and artist Giovanna Silva documents an often unnoticed reality of the city of Venice. The usually prevalent depictions of the lagoonal city with its prestigious memorials, monuments, canals, bridges, and squares give way to an unglamorous image of Venice focusing on the infrastructure of its daily maintenance: storage facilities and utility rooms, access corridors and transit spaces, construction sites and barriers. Due to its particular location, surrounded by water, the city not only requires special care, but also demands different tools, media, speeds, as well as extraordinary bodily effort for its maintenance and preservation. Goods and waste have to be transported, squares and canals cleaned, facades and flooded floors repaired. Silva’s images draw attention to this necessary everyday work and all the craftspeople and construction workers, handlers, and cleaning personnel who keep the city alive. FG

The Institute of Radical Imagination (IRI), founded in 2018, is a network of artists, academics, and curators working at the intersection of art and the commons. Their project Art for Universal Basic Income (Art for UBI)—consisting of a manifesto, a campaign, and a book—advocates for an unconditional universal basic income (UBI) above the poverty threshold and focuses on the role of art worker struggles in the transition to post-capitalist forms of social organization. The project also includes a performance, which will premiere on the occasion of the German Pavilion’s opening on May 19, 2023, in the context of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition—La Biennale di Venezia, and will draw on the experiences of cultural workers in Venice and beyond. Ahead of the performance, its coordinator, Marco Baravalle, a founding member of the IRI and Art for UBI, writes about the origins of the project and the structures and assumptions underlying the Venetian cultural scene.

“To talk about architecture without talking about toilets is to operate in denial of a whole array of sexual, psychological, and moral economies. For all the endless apparent talk about the body in architecture, architects don’t really want to talk about it. Architectural discourse is a deodorizer.”

Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley, “Toilet Architecture: An Essay about the Most Psychosexually Charged Room in a Building” (2017–18).¹

The annual cycle of Biennales in Venice is set out as a performative showcase and uses an incredible amount of resources. It is not exceptional for a single contribution to use more than 200 cubic meters of un recyclable expanded polystyrene (EPS). The concept of the German contribution to the Architecture Biennale 2023 hinges on ex clusively working with previously used materials. After the end of the Biennale Arte 2022, materials from over 40 pavilions and ex hibitions—which would otherwise have been dis carded—were gathered and exhibited in the German Pavilion as “spolia.” However, this material repository is no immutable exhibition: Its contents will be made accessible for reuse in other projects across Venice over the entire duration of the Architecture Biennale. A fully operational workshop in the Pavilion will benefit this project and act as a platform to promote urban interventions in cooperation with local grassroots organizations. Fostering a buil ding practice conscious of its material usage is in itself a form of main te nance work on the existing building stock.

– A Note on Historical Materialism

Spolia are elements of a structure—be it a building or work of art—that were not created for this purpose, meaning they were taken from a different context and put into a new one.

A building that makes use of spolia is, in this respect, heterogeneous. It displays a historical rupture. Spolia are enduring. Spolia are materials that persist into the present despite structural change. Metaphorically speaking, spolia are memories contained in material.

The Venice Biennales and their growing number of so-called Collateral Events accelerate the unfettered commodification of space by the profit-oriented culture industry, which in turn leads to an increase in mass tourism. As a consequence, everyday life—and its networks of social and material acts of care not geared toward turning a profit—are progressively being driven out of the city. While the commercialization of space leads to the city’s depopulation, more than 2,000 publicly owned apartments across the city stand empty and are left to decay. Organizations from civil society are trying to reverse these trends. They under stand the care for urban and community structures as a means to ensure the right to housing and the right to the city: a form of urban maintenance. Their work, reminiscent of historically rooted practices of squatting and maintaining, is more than mere selfhelp. It addresses social inequalities and translates them into political demands for society as a whole. Reappropriating and defending public spaces constitutes the backbone of these organizations’ activism.

– The Squatting and Maintenance of the Casette Neighborhood in Giudecca

Chiara Buratti is an activist with Assemblea Sociale per la Casa (ASC, or Social Assembly for Housing), a grassroots organization that has been fighting for the right to housing in Venice for years. ASC works with residents to restore and maintain abandoned public housing units, offering an alternative to fleeing the city’s soaring rents. We met her at Laboratorio Occupato Morion, a self-governing, occupied community center, where we were joined by Laura Fregolent, professor of urban planning at Università IUAV di Venezia, to discuss the maintenance of public housing, the rental market, tourism, and the right to inhabit Venice.

The mantra of new construction is often recited as the solution to the housing crisis, despite the challenges it poses for climate policy. But from a social and ecological perspective, the prevailing orientation toward new construction is leading toward a cul-de-sac. Looking back at history makes something obvious: Approaches to creating the city of tomorrow already exist. Berlin’s squatters’ movement of the 1980s and the city’s program of “cautious urban regeneration” can be considered prime examples of how a city grown over centuries can use its resources mindfully. But the concept of “cautiousness” adopted by these movements extended far beyond a material, resource-efficient approach to urban renewal; its impact was achieved above all through the momentum of democratization processes and by prioritizing social issues.

– Design Practices Between Care, Allyship, and the Fight for the Right to the City

The neighborhood and tenants’ association Kotti & Co, founded in 2011, is shaped by its many members from migrant communities, and is considered the cradle of a new movement called “Stadt von unten” [city from below], which centers on tenants’ rights. Kotti & Co’s activist practice derives from the idea of caring for the urban environment and defending the right to housing for the inhabitants at Kottbusser Tor square (affectionately called “Kotti” by locals), in Berlin’s Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg district, who often face multiple kinds of marginalization simultaneously. Today, Kotti & Co plays an important role in urban policy discourse and the struggle for the socially minded and democratic provisioning of housing and against displacement and racism in the city. Tashy Endres (an active member of Kotti & Co from 2012 to 2017) and Sandy Kaltenborn (cofounder of Kotti & Co) reflect on twelve years of activism and on the group’s protest strategies from a political, spatial, and design point of view. They also discuss the emancipatory potential of the underlying processes driving the formation of collectives and knowledge, while also critically addressing the role of institutions and professions in the project of comprehensive social transformation.