workshop «Space of Uncertainty»

[Laurent Malone]

«Space of Uncertainty»

This interdisciplinary workshop involves several subject matters, such as architecture, urbanism and music, making them interact with one another. Conceived as a cooperation project, it strives to bring about an encounter between local culture and a process of territory exploration. With its rich industrial past, Gabrovo is an economically derelict city, waiting for new strategies concerning its still available spaces, with unresolved identities, in the expectation of a redefinition or a development project.
My suggestion is a collective walk with the participants of the workshop and the city's inabitants, according to a mental axis crossing the industrial heritage and its memory. During the act of walking, the city workers' memories and tales will be gathered, by inviting each one to tell his recollections of the places formerly «inhabited», in comparison with the encountered architecture. Thanks to the presence of musicians / walkers, these tales will give birth to a collective song spreading itself across the whole city.
A new way of inhabiting these places and reflecting upon their future.
The act of walking becomes a collective performance, allowing the involved group to experience the space physically.

Brief biography of Laurent Malone (http://www.laurentmalone.com/)
Artist, publisher (http://integral.laurentmalone.com/editions/) and director of osservatorionomade-marseille and Lives and works in Marseilles.
Laurent Malone is a photographer who works on the analysis and documentation of urban space transformations, based on itineraries mapped out in different cities. Walking is at the center of the photographic process developped by him.
In New York as well as in other European and Asian cities, Laurent Malone carries on an obstinate chronicle of urban transformations, with a special focus on the non-planned uses of public spaces, such as the occupation by female Filipino workers of a motorway footbridge or the Hong Kong Central Bank, the crossing of NY in a straight line in the direction of JFK Airport (with Dennis Adams), the occupation of a wasteland in Marseilles, or a walk in the direction of Corviale (Rome)... These observations of the public space constantly bring back urban architecture on the scale of human occupation.

Typology of suggested workshops : pluridisciplinary, based on the urban walk as a means of reading the urban space in a critical way.


Osservatorionomade-marseille is an interdisciplinary research project, offering different types of actions based on specific practices of territory explorations.
Thereby, the actions develop a sensitive cartography of particular territories, communities and their memory.
Through the act of walking, listening and exchanging, the project gives great importance to an experimental approach. Generating evolutive and self-organized processes, the practices aim at reinforcing social ties and environment relationships, presently absent from those neglected territories.
a methodological direction, walking as a way of surveying
In this project, the act of walking is considered as a critical tool to help discovering the city’s unconscious, and getting to know a territory as well as interpreting it symbolically. Walking becomes a public process of exploration and knowledge of the urban context.
Walking with other people is a way of getting acquainted with the city and its identities, of creating room for looking, listening and speaking. It also gives the opportunity to meet the other and put the public space in motion.
http://www.osservatorionomade-marseille.com/