2019 Sunday March 10: Roaming Assembly#23 ~ Babel/New Babylon. Forms of Education and Architecture that Exile Returns ~ Introduction by Leire Vergara

It wouldn’t be hare-brained to place that which Nader Vassoughian calls Gypsy Urbanism, in the origins of the conception of space, of ideas, of things that we know as the Bauhaus. This “abusive” metaphor in which the people of Rrom take part, tries to designate the improvised and provisional architectures, the informal occupation of space within urban peripheries in Central European cities of the 10s and 20s of the past century, built and disposed for Gypsies most certainly, but also for Ukrainian migrant Jews or for displaced peasants from the entire Balkan area.

Without a doubt, the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, this swansong of the Bauhaus itself, also appears to be impregnated by Gypsy, Romany and Flamenco gestures. Projects like New Babylon and many "tools" of the Situationist International (such as psychogeography, derive, unitary urbanism) address these gestures as buried symptoms.

Babel/New Babylon. Forms of Education and Architecture that Exile Returns proposes to observe how those gestures, appearing at the beginning and in the end of that History with capital letters that refers to the Bauhaus, mess up, alter, stir and cross out, sing and dance the attainments and failures, with minor narratives, anecdotes, oral stories of almost, now most certainly, the bauhaus with small letter.

Situated in a variety of references in order to rethink the notion of modern space, the Factory workshop The art’s room conducted by Pedro G. Romero and Leire Vergara at the DAI has developed as a pedagogic space in which knowledge has been shared through a constructive process. The outcome derived from a patchwork of textile and textual pieces will create a specific scenography for Roaming Assembly#23 at the Bauhaus in Dessau. 

Babel/New Babylon. Forms of Education and Architecture that Exile Returns aims to explore some of these forms, formless and deformed experiences that exile has left behind as real forms-of-life. These are not only forms that got lost, or not only a counter-political memory or the resistance of those who were defeated. They are also forms that can help to construct the present, so as to imagine the future. 

Babel/New Babylon. Forms of Education and Architecture that Exile Returns will focus on the critical pertinence of Architecture and Education that since the meetings of "the congress of free artists" in Alba in Italy from 1954 - 1956, have re-emerged in many diverse forms: critical pedagogies, informal architectures, institutional critique, etc. A permanent exile of forms that time after time appear, disappear and reappear.

Roaming Assembly #23 Babel/New Babylon. Forms of Education and Architecture that Exile Returns aims to point to this ghostly psychogeography.

OVERVIEW +BIO'S:

Roaming Assembly#23 ~ Babel/New Babylon. Forms of Education and Architecture that Exile Returns