Moéca is the name that the Venetians gave to the local crab (common crab “Carcinus Mediterraneus”), when it reaches the peak of the moulting phase, with the loss of its armour and before, in a few hours, in contact with brackish or salt water, it rebuilds it .
The large metal object designed by Lemonot for “The Convivial Laboratory”, during FAROUT, is exactly like this: a space that seems about to transform – to seize that moment in which disorientation becomes awareness.
Apparently rigid, Moéca is instead multifaceted: it welcomes, anticipates and adapts – prefiguring practices of radical conviviality within the spaces of BASE Milano. Built with a series of iron modules, sprawling and tangential, culminating in 14 tilting seats – it is at the same time table and theatre, stage and platea. It can be composed and decomposed into a thousand different configurations: inside Moéca, conviviality becomes a tool for imagining and experimenting with new pedagogical mechanisms, in which we learn through alternative ways of being together. As soon as we think we have understood how to use it, Moéca asks us to get back into the game – inviting us to rethink the relationships between audiences, actors and actresses, between known and unknown, between desire and possibility. Moéca is indeed a fluid place: a precise geometry that creates a soft* architecture.
*After all, in Venetian dialect moèche literally means “soft”.
