URBAN RE/CREATION CITYLAB
NOW PROJECT TEAM SLOVAK             "2004/2005 SEASON" "05/06 SEASON CD" EVENTS TEXTS URBAN GAME

 

 

 

 

 


 
Urban Re/creation Citylab
series of presentations, lectures and workshops about the phenomenon of the city

 
Short characteristics
 
URBAN RE/CREATION CITYLAB, project of ATRAKT ART - Association for Contemporary Art and Culture, consists of a series of multimedia cross-disciplinary educative and creative evenings in diverse forms. The project tries to motivate people to engage in a more sensitive and creative perception of their living environment and architectural spaces. We organize presentations, lectures, film projections and discussions that all have a common theme: the city. Project Urban Re/Creation Citylab started in October 2004. The goal of the project is to push the senses of people stuck in their daily routines into the position of a tourist seeking adventure and something different. In Urban Re/Creation we don’t leave the well-known environment to explore the exotic and bizarre, but bring the feeling of unknown to an otherwise common milieu. Through different means and specialists (architects, visual artists, theorists, internet artists,...) the project tries to explore new worlds in the interactive relationship between the environment and the public.

 
Goals, meaning of the project
 
The idea of Urban Re/Creation Citylab is influenced by current context of postmodern concepts of human behavior as one of the most significant philosophers and sociologists, Zygmunt Bauman, sees it. In his “Reflections on Postmodern Times” Bauman has drawn attention to a general prototype of the modern human – the tourist. “The tourist leaves his home, to seek impressions. (...) He seeks new experiences and new experiences bring only something new, something he hasn’t seen that is different from his everyday life.“ This hunger for the exotic also brings a certain hardening in the perception of familiar environments, a phenomenon to which our project reacts.
 
The main goal of the project is to enhance the sensitivity of citizens and artists to their own urban environments. Our goal is to put the person into the position of a “tourist” in their own homes. To prepare him to be able to find noticeable moments and innovative experiences, create new mental maps of “old, well-known” places and to experience the feeling of recreation in his own home. We continue in the tradition of past events we have organized since 2004 that aim to increase the interests of the public in current architecture. In presentations and discussions we would like to seek connections and analogies to local problems and on this basis we also invite foreign lecturers.
 
The means of this recreation is creation. The spaces of European cities has become and will become the object of innovative and interdisciplinary projects of artists from various countries. The goal of the evenings is to present different projects from the field of public art, design, typography, psychogeography and mental cartography among others. We would like to present an intensive and up-to-date overview about the forms of such urban re/creation already realized abroad and here at home.
 
The project is also interactive – participants have the chance to discuss and create their own urban re/creation in workshops and refresh their relationship to the city. Part of the project “Children and the City” is oriented to youth and their perception of the world around them. Children in several Slovak towns (Bratislava, Trenčín, Žilina, Banská Bystrica) had and will have access to digital cameras to record the places they find interesting and fascinating – places they go after school. Then they will present and compare their visual records and also invite adults to see their world.

 
Support
 
Bratislavská Investičná, a.s.
VE-TEX, spol. s r. o.
Young4BA
Eurotel
Ministry of Culture of Slovak Republic
and others
 
Mastering: B&B Studio, Bratislava
CD/web: Dušan Barok
 
Translation: Zuzana Černáková, Eric Smillie