skeletons aren't only in our closets.

I recently read a review of SmartCity a Festival Emergencies conference held in Paris. Festival Emergencies is an 'international festival of electronic cultures and new art forms', which this year is focused on “urban activism and artistic interventions in public space”.

One of the presentations that really interested me was mOmentoMoNUMENTO put forth by one of my favorite architectural firms, Exyst and an equally interesting Brazilian collective, Coloco.

Coloco have, for the last seven years, been studying the phenomena of skeleton dwellings. These dwellings have emerged because industry and housing, as a result of urban sprawl, are being pushed further and further from the cities core and have left large buildings that once defined the cities central area vacant. Groups of individuals have begun to inhabit these dwellings and organize the space to suit their needs. Government sometimes will intervene and other times allow the individuals to occupy the space in an effort to re-establish the cities center.

Exyst utilizes temporary interventions mixing experimental architecture, graphic art instillations, film, music and even food-related programs together to impact and diversify the urban environment. They are also hip to the skeleton dwelling phenomena and have recently began to focus on alternative cheap housing and as an experiment sent 450 architecture students to inhabit one of these skeleton dwellings the project: Republique Ephemere is definitely worth a gander.
Together Exyst and Coloco are combining their experience-based knowledge and teaming up with Cultures France, a French arts initiative to engage with other nations (for those of you who don’t speak French), to offer a traditional French monument (eg. The statue of liberty) to Brazil. The Sao Paulo government has offered up an abandoned building built in 1965 to the two architectural forces to be reckoned with to do what they please. The architects have a year to make it work.

I really like the idea of collaboration between those in need and the government on such a grassroots level. The inhabitation of abandoned buildings also seems like a good way to get things moving in a positive direction. Individuals living without a fixed address or in dismal public housing situations would be able to take control of their living situations, and abandoned city buildings could once again serve a purpose. Perhaps this notion may seem somewhat un-realistic in a city like Winnipeg I truly believe that with a little bit of guidance, collaboration between government, individual and design professionals, successes like what Coloco and Exyszt have observed may be possible.