3/3 Salon Talk: On Maintenance
7 PM, the event will be followed by a receptionPlease note:
* The date of this event has been changed from the originally communicated date of 15.2.23.
** The event space is without heating. Please be sure to wear warm clothing!
The S AM’s winter exhibition, ‘Make Do With Now: New Directions in Japanese Architecture’ (12 November 2022 – 12 March 2023) shines a light on a younger, lesser-known generation of Japanese architects and urban practitioners who are developing a range of critical, ecological, and social practices that creatively ‘make do’ – with limited resources, with found materials, with existing spaces – while seeking appropriate responses to the urgent problems of the present. To coincide with the exhibition, the S AM is collaborating with LINA, the European architecture platform, to organize a series of informal talk events bringing protagonists from this burgeoning scene into dialogue with practitioners from the European context. Each event, which will take place in the workspace of a young practice based in Basel, brings together three practitioners working on similar themes in different locations: one from Japan, one the EU, and one from Switzerland. Short presentations of their work will be followed by an open-format discussion in which members of the audience are actively encouraged to take part.
In the third and final talk of the series, we will tackle the topic of maintenance. In architecture, maintenance – along with adjacent activities such as repairing or cleaning – is all too often seen as a menial task, the labor invested in it as somehow inferior or less valuable than the creation of something new. Yet in an age of degrowth and climate emergency, as architecture no longer just means the design of new buildings but rather the care and transformation of existing ones, perhaps the time is ripe for a radical revaluation. What if we were to understand maintenance not as merely keeping the status quo, but as a practice with creative potential in its own right?
We look forward to discussing these topics and more with the three featured groups, who are each, in their own way, engaged in the reinterpretation of maintenance as a generative practice in their work.
With: GROUP, architects, with Arata Mino, artist, Tokyo JP
Space Saloon, collective, various locations, and The MAAK, spatial practice, Cape Town ZA
Truwant + Rodet +, architects, Basel CH
Moderated by: Yuma Shinohara, S AM
In cooperation with LINA, co-funded by the Creative Europe Program of the European Union
Special thanks to Truwant + Rodet + for agreeing to host this event.
Venue: Truwant + Rodet +, Klingelberstrasse 11, 4056 Basel
Language: English
Photo: Studio GROSS, still from the film “CHAr” © Studio GROSS
