NEIGHBOURS: The 10th Edition of The Warsaw Under Construction Festival

Neighbours is the theme of the 10^th Festival of Architecture and Urbanism Warsaw Under Construction held since 2009 by the Warsaw Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Warsaw. 

This year, Visual Culture Research Centre has been invited to curate the festival. The festival program has been divided between Warsaw and Kyiv.

Kyiv’s Petrivska Street, 34 (‘Thicket’) is going to be a venue for the Neighbours urban project during September 19-28, 2018.

Until the 1990’s, Kyiv’s Petrivska Street connected Podil with the Upper City. The political, social and geological cataclysms led to the abandonment of this route. The local buildings were gradually destroyed and turned into an impassable thicket: forces of nature crowded people out of this area.

After several decades of abandonment, the area was occupied by artistic communities. The adjacent garages have become a place for the development of music counter-culture, graffiti, performance art, and so on. Oleksandr Burlaka’s specially designed architectural project has to revive the abandoned area for the benefit of the city dwellers.

As part of the Neighbours project, there will be held an educational program dedicated to the issues of emergency architecture. This is an international movement that aims to provide architectural solutions for the areas affected by rapid urbanization, poverty, conflict, and natural disasters. A series of debates, visual presentations, workshops, and musical events will be held by architects, art historians, and urban philosophers and practitioners. They will address the negative effects of the chaotic urban development resulting from illegal space appropriations, visual warfare, and military intervention.

The festival will include the events dedicated to architecture, landscape design, graffiti culture, alternative music, and cinematography.

The festival program offers workshops, lectures by Ukrainian and European architects, music and graffiti jams, and film screenings. As part of the festival, the adjacent area will be arranged by Formografia design studio (the founders of the Ostriv Science and Art Platform).

The educational program includes the lecture The Figures of Negativity: Elements of Architecture of Contradiction by Mattia Pretolani, an architect, the lead manager of EASA 2019; the lecture Architectural Agency. Small Projects by Tomasz Świetlik, the chief architect of Stsena in Dnipro City; and the lecture Architecture of Commune by the Ukrainian architect Dana Kosmina. The musical part includes Zakip vol.7, and the first Kyiv’s graffiti shop GARAGE CANSHOP will hold a graffiti battle. The festival will host the partner events of the DIY STVO Urban Culture Festival and be completed with the screening of Oleksiy Radynsky’s film Landslide XL.