The Project

The Institute of __________ is a knowledge exchange center and public institution that gives spatial possibilities to people who desire a place for new ideas and new encounters within the city.

Its main elements are:

The Institute

The Structure

The Workshops

The Institute is a collaborative project initiated by Pieterjan Grandry, Jia Gu, Valentina Karga and Rosario Talevi. We are four young designers currently working at the intersection of art and architecture. 

For Eme3 Festival of Architecture, we propose re-using the city as a resource, whose products, people and places are all part of a larger cycle of production.

THE WORKSHOPS

STEP 0 : BUILDING THE INSTITUTE June 20 – June 26  Construction of the Institute begins one week before Eme3 starts! An open call to citizens, local designers, architecture, art and design students to help us build this temporary and transformable architecture that becomes the setting for the workshops!

STEP 1 : REMAKE FURNITURE WORKSHOP June 26 & 27 | 11am – 5pm Is your chair missing a leg or does your cabinet have one too many shelves? Bring it to us!Materials donated from locals will be re-appropriated to create special furniture for the Institute! Its previous owners are invited to give us their unwanted furnitures (chairs, tables, stools, boxes, dressers) in any condition, and we will remake it with workshop participants.

Drop in workshop

STEP 2 : THE SUPER SOLAR COOK-OFF June 28 | 10:30am – 6pm Cook with the sun! Learn to make your own parabolic solar cooker with simple materials. Participants will cook their first solar cooked meal, while local chefs will judge the dishes. There is gonna be a prize for the best solar cooked dish!

STEP 3 : FRUIT JAMMING WITH GRANDMA June 28 | 3pm – 7pm Jam making wih local grandmothers ! Learn how to make jam from market leftovers !

STEP 4 : CHEESE OPERA Friday, June 29 | 4pm – 7pm  Learn how to make cheese by yourself from fresh milk!

ARTIST LED BAR Friday, June 29 | 7pm – 10pm  In the evening, the Institute transforms into an artist bar. EME3 artists and participants are invited to organize and host a bar for one evening to celebrate!

STEP 5 : THE BIG LUNCH Saturday, June 30 12am – 6pm Cooking 5pm – 6pm Projection of the Documentary “Homage a Catalonia II”

The public, local residents, visitors and festival participants are invited to join us in a collective dinner! A big lunch with local food collected from market leftover, grocers or neighbhorhood gardens. All the results of previous workshops culminate with the big lunch; market food is cooked in the DIY solar cookers, grandma’s fruit jam becomes dessert; we wash the dishes with the soap from Soap Opera, and all the food waste goes to the compost pile which will make the soil for the community to start their own garden there. Dinner guests can come to cook or bring their own special dishes to be shared in a collective dinner. In the evening, we will have a special film screening and discussions (content to be determined..)

more info and subscription by email at [email protected]

THE STRUCTURE

It begins with a simple, transformable structure constructed from recovered materials (doors, windows, cabinets etc) that can be taken apart to make workshops with. This structure, the office-cabin and a table, are the the simple architectural elements around which happenings, dinners and collective gatherings happen. The Institute then acts as an infrastructure that 'grows' through a series of curated workshops dealing with public action and experimentation with do-it-yourself methods of production, which extends to building, making, cooking, using and re-using.

Over time, individuals and organizations in the neighborhood can plug into this structure, and begin to propose their own spatial interventions or knowledge exchanges. Dinners and artist-led bars will play a catalytic role in getting to know the neighbors and facilitating new encounters…

The Institute is forever under construction.

THE INSTITUTE

The Institute Of __________ is a knowledge exchange center and public institution that gives spatial possibilities to people who desire a place for new ideas and new encounters within the city.

The Institute is not permanent. It is nomadic and changing. It opens, closes, travels, hides and grows. It is always improvising and improving. The Institute is forever under construction

The Institute is not about autonomous art or autonomous architecture. Instead, we want to contribute to the idea that a place is more than the sum of its buildings, and that architecture is a tool for giving form and potential to these shared spaces.

But we are not deterministic: we want to design a space of possibilities. We provide the ingredients, you can make the meal.

Jars of Fame from our friends and supporters! Each and everyone of you tasted delicious. 

Jar of Fame (Part 2!)

Ivan!

We don't know where you are in the world these days, but we had hoped to meet you in our workshops. In the end you are a mysterious patron we did not have the privilege to thank personally - so please accept a virtual one! 

The festival was absolutely amazing and we had a truly transformative time, meeting new people in the neighborhood and the city and making contact with some remarkable collaborators including Pez Estudio, raumlaborberlin and Re-Cooperar! 

In this photo you find the survivors of the last days of the festival, along with our friends at Eme3! From top left, there is Javier Planas (director of Eme3), Rosita (our Berlin-Argentine contributor), Pieter, Jia, Andreas Sollazzo and Louisa Vermoere (from Brussells!). Bottom left is Charlotte Debarle (co-director), Valentina and our amazing Barcelona contributor Laura Torello! We send you greetings!!

cheers

the Institute of PM

Agapimeni Ifigeneia!

Ti kaneis? Nomizw eisai Ellada diakopes? Molis simera gurisame apo Varkelwni:)

The project went very well! We started only two days before the festival due to delay of material delivery but with the assistance of some students and friends (from Rotterdam and Berlin!) that came to help, we finished it very fast.I didn't have time to built much since I had to be around organizing the micro-things for the workshops..The most difficult was to find fresh non-pasterized milk for the cheese workshop! But we were lucky; one night it happened we went for a beer next to a small bio-shop of a nice couple that had contact with a producer in a farm out of Barcelona. He delivered the 15 L milk for us and then we had to ask a caffe close to the site to keep the milk in the fridge for a while..The cheese was delicious!

Some evenings we had a bit of time to follow the debates of the festival. The discussion of activation of urban space through social structures seemed to me very developed in Spain. I wonder how is it in Greece.

I can't keep myself of sending you more than one picture:) I am looking forward for the day we will do a project together! Maybe in Greece???

Looking forward to your news.

a big hug from all of us,

Valentina, Pieter, Jia

Christina darling, 

I also couldn't resist sending you just one photo so I sent you six! Being the foodie that you are, I figured you would appreciate all the food action happening in our project - from solar cooking to jamming to home-made cheese (using raw sheep milk!) 

Everything was made on site and with participants! For the solar cookers, we used discarded cardboard we found in the streets and aluminum foil and transformed them into a parabolic solar cooker (well, mathematically I'm sure it's not perfectly parabolic, but it worked!). Then we painted the glass jars black to absorb and retain the concentrated energy from the sun, and voila! a perfectly solar kitchen! With the right device, you can even fry food or boil water. We stuck to the basics: zucchini, aubergine, carrots, tomatoes, garlic, olive oil, thyme and rosemary seasoning for a perfectly respectable meal. Within an hour or two!

I don't suppose you could replicate the same effect in the Bay area, except maybe on extremely rare and sunny days. Guess you have to come down to southern cali to test it out.

Miss you and lots of love, 

Jia

Dear Philippe, 

Thank you for supporting our project!! In the end, the Institute found a second home with the group Idensitat, who will dismantle the structure from the site in Raval and reconstruct it for use in their workshops. For four days, Idensitat will undertake the construction of mobile devies that give visibility to the demands of Cruilles Recreant, working for the reappropriation of the area Germanetes, to enable a temporary intervention within its public spaces! We'll update you as we hear more ourselves. 

Meanwhile, enjoy this image of the Institute's birth - here is Pieter and our two local team mates Marina and Juan Ramon setting up the walls of the Institute in the first week! 

Thanks again, we hope you can join us in the next workshops!

cheers

the Institute of PM

Danielle!

Welcome to Carcelona. In this photo is the anonymous installations along the fence - temporary tagging by plastic cups! A play of words between carcel (prison) and Barcelona, the installation was meant as a commentary on the restrictive nature of public space and institutions within a city so defined by urban transformation and alternative cultures. Even with our foreigner-blinders on, we tasted a bit of the rules and regulations that underpinned this strangely objectified tourist city - no alcohol sales after 11:30pm (we were trying to restash the bar in the final party) and no shirtless-ness (our poor builders suffered tremendously in the heat wave that hit the city). Still, we managed. 

Thanks for following and backing - we wish you could have been here!

hugs

Jia Vale Pieter

Dearest Florentina, 

Hi darling! This photo was taken one of the first days of our building workshop where the bar and kitchen went up first (you can see what our priorities are). Here is your mother installing the shelving for the bar! With a drill in hand, she's irresistible. Thanks to her, we had an amazing final night with friends and local partiers to celebrate a most beautiful end to the festival. Next time you should come - we always need some clever girls on the building site! 

Did you have fun in your equestrian camp? We hope so! We prefer also to ride loose and easy Argentine style rather than that formal British nonsense. 

Write back to us! See you very soon in Berlin! 

love

Jia Valentina Pieter

Dear Marco,

I hope you and Mireia are doing well! Here in Barcelona is very nice, we love the weather and the food, but you know better than me this two aspects of Spain! too much meat though.. Anyway, after we finished the construction of the Institute we started the workshops! First to go was the solar cooking workshop; we experimented with making two kinds of solar cookers, a funnel one and a parabolic one. Participants split in two teams and cooked different dishes,one with potatoes and another with rice. Louisa is here and she was the head chef of the "curry team"!Unfortunately none of the food was cooked through:( we didn't start on time, as scheduled and we put the food a bit late in the afternoon. On saturday we ll aim for 12 o'clock at noon and hopefully it will go better! Today we re making marmalade and cheese! Fingers crossed!

Love,

Pieter, Jia, Valentina

p.s: in the picture you see Jia teaching children from the neighborhood how to make solar cookers! We are located in the philippino neighborhood. We had to bribe them with ice creams! It reminded me of you with the indian kids....

Dear Ana! We are missing you these days at our project site! Finally after all the material collecting (thanks to you!) we have built up a structure and can reward ourselves with a little collective inactivity under the blue plastic sky. Hope to see you again before we leave! Hugs Jia Vale Pietr

Dear Cody Everyday we have to load and unload materials from our storage site in the hinter courts of Barcelonas Cultural Center to our site a few blocks away. It's become a bit of a ritualistic process every morning to lug huge planks and sheets of wood across the historic courtyards of the center and bring it to our building site. Here's a photo of the team and the heroic van Xx Jia Vale Pieter

Dear Sam I figure you've seen enough images of the project since you're just next door to us everyday working on your own, so I thought I would share with you a picture of a place you have not yet had a chance to see - our rented studio space for the two weeks we are here. We are three to five sharing two beds and one tiny shower, but we live this gorgeous photo studio. Below us is a bar called Raco des Glories where the morning conversations and clatter of cups and dishes serve as our wake up call. Maybe you'll take coffee with us here one day. We have enough space. Love Jia Vale Pieter

Dear Babs Check it out! Just the beginnings of the Institute... We built a small structural frames for it on the first day of building. It went pretty fast with the handful of students who joined our building workshop. In this photo is Pieter and Marina a student at the local university who has been with us since day 1. Can't wait to share more as we progress! Wish you and Aaron were here to join us Xx Jia