On Saturday, August 4th, the annual European Architecture Students Assembly EASA hosted their final exhibition, showing off the works of 40 workshops and over 500 participants in the city of Rijeka, Croatia.
At this year’s RE:EASA, So & So Studio has hosted a workshop, entitled re:MAP. The workshop challenged its 25 participants to wander / identify / document / connect / activate “overlooked and underutilized” spaces, within the city of Rijeka, Croatia. The result has blanketed the city with more than 45 spatial “nodes”. These “nodes” were created in an effort to graphically communicate with the citizens and visitors of Rijeka regarding the hidden potential of programmatic function, behavioural activity and spatial usages of public space which have been declared overlooked by the workshop’s participants.
re:MAP has positioned itself among the most notable of this year’s (40) workshops with its widespread paint interventions, precisely placed within a 2 kilometer radius of the Rijeka-Export-Delta, that hosted the 2018 RE:EASA.
During their first week-long exploration and analysis of the city the participants were partitioned into four groups. Zoned by district, functional type and intervention color, they were then given the opportunity to develop their own collective, layered map using analog drawing and collaging techniques as part of their larger intervention studies. In the second part of their 14-day-workshop, using only paint, the participants were challenged to create a dialog with residents of the city and activate the potential of their documented spaces by collaging their ideas on to the city of Rijeka.
re:MAP is an urban experiment with an end goal of sparking curiosity and revealing new ways in which the citizens of Rijeka view and interact with their own public spaces.
So & So Studio has developed the re:MAP workshop as the first part of a larger project. Looking towards the European Capital of Culture’s presence in 2020, re:MAP seeks to create momentum likely to result in a sustainable long-term legacy for the city of Rijeka and the nation of Croatia by increasing all citizens and visitors accessibility to contemporary culture, historical monuments and local businesses, as well as activating inefficiently used and forgotten spaces.
Several of the physical interventions in 360 image format can be viewed here. For a glimpse into the process of the re:MAP workshop during their two-week stay at Rijeka-Delta watch this video.
Tutors: So & So Studio
Participants: Alessandra Mencancini, Anna Shishkina, Anna Eglite Sørensen, Dániel Győrfi, David Henderson, Egil Kahlbom, Elisabeth Sandel, Elena Demarco, Emma Anzolin, Gintare Petkeviciute, Giorgi Chinchaladze, Ivan Plamenov, Maria Savova, Orest Yaremchuk, Ralitsa Kirilova, Sophie Reiffenstuhl, Szimonetta Bódi, Tomiris Kupzhassarova, Úlfur Bragi Einarsson, Vlad Afanasiev, Yana Buchatska
