Architecture Ukraine (AU) – Beyond the Front opens a dialogue on some crucial issues in our time: envisioning the future of cities in places of ongoing conflict alongside the revival of post-industrial landscapes within an increasingly urbanised world.

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The project Tomorrow’s Cities Today: the Power of Urban Visions, conceived and created to support the international residency program Architecture Ukraine 2015 (Mariupol-Kyiv), explores our visual representation of city design. The exhibition deals with the visual depiction of future cities over the last 100 years, what such projects sought to communicate and why.

AU pop-up exhibition investigates the urban context of Mariupol and consists of installations, drawings, documentary videos, prototypes, models and video projections. This exhibition is the first stage of the international residency program. The Architecture Ukraine program has been designed to raise social awareness through a series of physical and digital intervention within the city or network of cities, affected by the ongoing war. Participants were asked to take a step back, gather and study data on the makeup of the urban conurbation and to investigate an aspect of social ‘fabric’ or ‘phenomena’.

Both exhibitions took place in Mariupol, 132 Budivel’nykiv Avenue.

The intense time spent in Kyiv with study trips to Mariupol has had a fruitful outcome. The projects have been well received and constructive feedback has prepared the residents for the second phase that will see some of the key ideas being implemented and realised on site in Mariupol.

The pop up exhibition will travel to Mariupol in October to gather feedback and reflections from the local community. This is a part of the design process, that will allow the projects to be strengthened and adjusted.

Throughout the next year residents will develop their projects for the conclusion of the residency in the summer of 2016. Stay tuned for updates, articles and more.

Thank you all for the amazing summer and the hard work to make Mariupol a city that truly inspires.

AU team.

Black Sea. Terraces everywhere. Swimming. Art. Terraces. Family party. Vodka. Food. Granny’s dancing. Terraces. Cocktails. Streets, squares, parks. Dreams. Terraces. Streets. Port. Beach. Sun. Family house dacha. Champagne. Friends. Ping-Pong. Vodka. Vodka. Food. Amazing.

Izolyatsia provided us with some interesting lectures. One was about symbolic violence. Brigitte Piquard, professor at Oxford Brookes University, worked in several conflict zones such as in Colombia and the Palestinian city Hebron. She is researcher and lecturer on the topic of Symbolic Violence.

Symbolic violence is defined as a “soft, insensible, form of violence, exercised mainly by purely symbolic channels of communication and knowledge“ (Pierre Bourdieu).

When there are acts of symbolic violence it is justifying the existence of injustice, marginalisation, exclusion, domination and discrimination through a process of normalization.

Her research made clear that it is possible to reducing the impact of symbolic violence. The nine main ingredients for this are: education, home attachment, activism, livelihoods, environment, community cohesion, connection, art & communication, and moments of exception.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieu

Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and professor at Yale held a lecture Extrastatecraft, in wich she described repeatable formulas and spatial products, that make most of the space in the world.

Ms. Easterling told that, now, not only buildings but also entire cities have become spatial products that typically reproduce free zone world cities like Shenzhen or Dubai.

“Space has become a mobile, monetized, almost infrastructural, technology, where infrastructure is not only the urban substructure, but also the urban structure itself. Some of the most radical changes to the globalizing world are being written, not in the language of law and diplomacy, but rather in the language of this infrastructure space. Massive global infrastructure systems, administered by mixtures of public and private cohorts and driven by profound irrationalities, generate de facto, undeclared forms of polity faster than any even quasi-official forms of governance can legislate them”, – Keller Easterling commented.

Acording to her, infrastructure space, with the power and currency of software, is something like an operating system for shaping the city. Exposing evidence of this infrastructural operating system is as important as acquiring skills to hack into it, and infrastructure space tutors special approaches to both form making and political arts.