Architectural Design Studio 7, alongside other Design Studios from MA Architecture, MA City Design, MA Fashion at the Royal College of Art in London, presents a series of artefacts that frame conviviality as an active tool to be performed through a wide range of spatial practices at multiple scales. These practices address, with radical gentleness, various contexts of super-diversity – challenging them as layered resourcescapes, with precious material and relational capacity.
For ADS7 conviviality is connected to subtle quotidian practices, unmarked routines and exceptional acts of improvisation. When addressed convivially, daily encounters across difference turn into privileged moments for performing processes of debate, translation, and consensus building, but also into places of possible constructive tensions. Our focus on conviviality thus entails considering conflict and unconvivial dynamics as well: irritation, dissatisfaction, dissonance and frustration are equally important modes of human togetherness. This tight relationship with the everyday is exactly what makes conviviality politically relevant.
The drawings, physical models and video fragments on display here are some of the explorations that ADS7 students’ have carried out in 2022/23 and in 2023/24. Last year we performed conviviality as a gentle act of resistance, while this year we’re further deconstructing its politics as a way to reassemble its mechanisms in space – designing convivial devices that engage with the nuances between cohabitation and collaboration.
BIO
ADS7 practices forms of conviviality and convivial-isms as tools to challenge all the possibilities of coexistence. In particular, we investigate what it means to “live together with and in difference” within the super-diverse settings and migration-driven processes of our contemporary world. The Studio questions demarcation lines that fuel injustice and marginalisation, to prevent everyday interactions from becoming sites of boundary-making.
Don’t miss the talk with Royal College of Art and ADS7 about the concept of belonging.