Potenziale 3: Common Ground

Dates

15 October 2021 – 12 February 2022

Place

aut. architektur und tirol, Innsbruck

Format

Exhibition design and spatial intervention, part of the Faculty of Architecture’s exhibition Potenziale 3

Team

Walter Prenner, Verena Rauch (Studio 3), Eleni Boutsika Palles (Institute of Architectural Theory), Xotil Natke

With

Studio 3 and the Institute of Architectural Theory, artists and Innsbruck initiatives

A threshold

Potenziale 3 was a jointly curated exhibition of the Faculty of Architecture, showing current research and design. The entrance and the large hall were designed as the “Intervention Lab”. The entrance was not treated as a neutral passage but as a meaningful space between institution and public, university and city: a place of encounter, irritation and activation.

The guiding image: “Walls for writings no one sees – a stage for voices no one hears.” As a cultural space outside the university but working closely with it, the aut became an extended public space where architectural knowledge, design practice and social debate could meet.

Common ground

Podiums, modular seating landscapes, a light space-filling structure, projections and sound were designed so that none of them had a fixed function. The space was meant to make situations possible rather than to prescribe uses, moving between exhibition, stage, assembly and lounge.

At its centre was a ramp. It was circulation, stage, grandstand and projection surface at once. Artists took it over: a group covered it with writing and painting, and the artist Peter Brandlmayr developed a performance on it together with Studio 3.

Reading corner and agenda

Underneath the main structure, a reading and seating corner offered books by Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, Łukasz Stanek and Andrej Holm. Video projections on the ramp and wall set large-scale urban development and rooftop landscapes against everyday appropriations and social movements: Occupy, Black Lives Matter, the feminist strikes in Spain, MeToo, as well as homelessness, hostile architecture and the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe.

An agenda opened the space to the city. Social movements, associations and organisations from Innsbruck were invited to use it for their meetings and discussions during the exhibition, so that the aut temporarily became a forum where architectural research, social movements and everyday practice met.

Looking back

Potenziale 3 can be read as a first approach to the principles of self-management, difference and utopia, before they had a name in this research. Visitors were addressed as participants, not as an audience, and the space was understood as a process, an invitation and an offer of dialogue, a laboratory for another way of producing and communicating space.

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Photos: aut. architektur und tirol and Institut für Gestaltung