Summer School as School
3-18 July, 2016
Public Program
Thursday, 14 July 2016 at 19:00
STEALTH. unlimited
Venue: Boxing Club
Mark Isaku Street, 10000 Prishtina
Republic of Kosovo
The talk starts from the year 2008, when during the outbreak of the financial crisis, STEALTH co-initiated the project Archiphoenix for the Dutch Pavilion at the International Architecture Exhibition in Venice. Archiphoenix was an attempt to collectively imagine a curriculum for an architecture profession stepping beyond the speculative and profit-driven overproduction of urbanity. While not evident immediately, that year would prove to be a turning point not just for STEALTH, as it would have an immense effect on the entire “spatial” profession across much of Europe. In the Netherlands, for instance, the number of practicing architects halved and many of the urban planning institutions got dissolved. Ever since, it became clear how deeply entrenched the unsustainability of urban production has remained, even if a number of practices have started underlining the necessity of a profoundly different approach. It is a crucial question whether such a different approach is indeed viable – or whether we will remain at odds, merely decorating the ongoing collapse around us. Based on four parts – Beyond 2008, Contours of a different city, (Dis)assembling the housing issue and Up-scaling, training, commoning – the talk will bring the shift in our own practice: from the practitioner as an external observer (researcher, curator), to becoming an equal part-taker in the transformation of society.
STEALTH.unlimited is the practice of Ana Džokić and Marc Neelen, equally based in the context of contemporary art and culture, as well as architecture. Through intensive collaboration with individuals, organisations and institutions, STEALTH connect urban research, visual arts, spatial interventions and spatial activism. They are co-initiators of Who Builds the City platform in Belgrade and City in the Making association in Rotterdam.
STEALTH’s curatorial interventions are a base for projects that, since 2004, mobilise thinking on shared collective future(s) in a/o Archiphoenix at the Dutch Pavilion at the Architecture Biennial in Venice, the Tirana International Contemporary Art Biennial, IMPAKT festival Matrix City in Utrecht, the fiction-based project Once Upon a Future for the Evento biannual in Bordeaux, the exhibition A Life in Common with Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto.
Their spatial interventions, since 2006, include a 600 m2 interactive art installation at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam, a public arts commission for a schoolyard in Knivsta, Sweden, hands-on community exploration in public space with Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg, a cultural development node out of recycled materials in a slum-neighbourhood of Medellín, Colombia, with El Puente_lab.
For more than fifteen years STEALTH investigate the urban developments in Western Balkans, starting from their Wild City research on the massive unplanned transformation of the city of Belgrade since the 1990s. From 2009 to 2013, STEALTH run four editions of the Cities Log research that investigated the roles of different players in the development of cities in the region.
Since 2011 STEALTH are contributing to practice based research at the Royal Institute of Arts in Stockholm. In this context, in 2013, they co-organised the conference Commoning the City. STEALTH gave about 130 lectures and contributed to numerous books and publications. They have been teaching internationally.
Main supporters of SSAS 2016:
ERSTE Foundation, The Austrian Federal Chancellery, Trust for Mutual Understanding (TMU), Ministry of Education of the Republic of Kosovo and RIT Kosovo.
SSAS 2016 is also supported by:
Culture for All - phase III, Municipality of Prishtina, Kosovo Foundation for Open Society (KFOS), Independent Curators International (ICI) , The Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung Prishtina Office, Ministry of Diaspora of the Republic of Kosovo, Austrian Embassy in Pristina, Embassy of the Republic of Slovenia Priština, Ambassade de France à Pristina, Youth Initiative for Human Rights Office in Belgrade, AMM, X-Print and DZG.