LOVE 19

Inhabi-Table

@AntePavilion competition

LOVE 19

Inhabi-Table

@AntePavilion competition

London,

2020

Love19 is an inhabitable, performative sculpture with a multiple nature: a table at the scale of architecture, a scenographic shelter, a permeable enfilade, made of hollow columns to be climbed - a roof to sit on, to admire the city and landscape from a unusual perspective.

Each column opens upwards, transforming itself into a lightweight fan vault: all together, juxtaposed and intersected, they give life to a shaded corridor, in which the light playfully manifests itself between the ribs and the curtains. The columns build an horizontal thick surface, flattened in the part facing the sky, at a height of 3.15 m As suspended garlands, each module is in fact composed of 48 flags of various shapes, in translucent white fabric, which wrap two rows of tennis referee chairs and support two sequences of green metal sunburst sticks.

This hanging elevated table - a geometric interweaving of 912 artificial foliage - features considerable dimensions: it's 17.35 meters long and 5.60 meters wide. Below it, between 40 and 50 people can linger simultaneously. At the table, however, there are only 19 seats. The exception creates the entrance, otherwise each diner sits 2.60 meters from those in front and 1.60 meters from those on the sides.

These are the dimensional parameters that quantify the artefact - the result of a diligent reflection on the current times. However, Love19 offers an alternative to the sadly recurring ready-to-use solutions - those that attempt to change directly and quickly certain rooted behaviours, established over time. Bodily relationships can be designed, rethought, even fabricated, but - fortunately - not controlled. They can't be measured in centimetres.

Love19 does not try to constrain, to adjust: it re-shuffles the proportions between space and objects, it aims to alter the foundations of perception and motor coordination that regulate the ordinary - it claims to stimulate a radically new use of the body. Love19 is designed to suggest, but it opens up to instinct, intuition, a physicality free to transform itself. Love19 invites - with pragmatic optimism - to rethink, creatively, movements and devices for the public space.

Lemonot

IL PRANZO DELLA DOMENICA

Play

Performative meal

@Kitchen Takeover _ Open Space Contemporary

IL PRANZO DELLA DOMENICA

Performative meal

@Kitchen Takeover _ Open Space Contemporary

Collevecchio,

2020

> Video

From our confinement in the countryside of Rome, we re-enact the conditions of a festive Sunday lunch, transforming a big wooden table into a surreal stage-set. We populate it with extravagant objects, ingredients, dishes, and memories. Everyone is invited. We perform at the table and this happens as a natural act: the Sunday lunch in Italy is by definition an ordinary yet exceptionally theatrical performance.

Sunday lunch is not a simple meal, it is a marathon. Therefore our project starts at the first light of dawn, when the kitchen begins to speak, to come alive, while all the members of the family sleep, in a triumph of smells and flavours, starting to prepare the sauce with which to season the pasta.

“A pig with a rosemary forest in the belly” - Carlo Emilio Gadda The hostess holds in her arms a roasted pig, “porchetta” - a dish traditionally eaten on special occasions, feasts and gatherings. Carrying its weight like a sacrificial animal, her parade starts from the kitchen until it reaches the table. The pork belly was filled with sage, pepper, salt and rosemary and cooked for over 6 hours. The scent lingers throughout the house, leaving behind a delicious aroma. We are all slowly waking up, with high hopes and expectations for this ‘first’ Sunday lunch together.

A sense of fear remains, you can smell it whilst preparing this delicious dish. After months of greed, feasting on negative news, frightening articles, and headlines from all over the world, we are still scared. Surely, the guests will blissfully jump on this porchetta. Yet, we can’t forget, we have been consumed by what we have witnessed: this moment of celebration is hiding a bitter aftertaste.

The verb "porchettare" means to stuff the meat with aromas and spices, whilst continuing to massage it, until achieving a harmonious blend. Similarly, hands, pieces of meat and cutlery intertwine into a visual feast of expressive trajectories and evocative gestures.

Food is not only an allegorical connector amongst the guests during this Sunday lunch. The porchetta, thanks to its copious length, becomes a physical place of encounter: via cutting, grabbing, sharing - hands can finally meet at the centre of the table, fulfilling the mutual lust for togetherness.

These hours spent in the countryside have left visible marks on the table, appearing now as a kind of violent and passionate battlefield. Generous meals in Italy are often associated with cheerful warfare, where even angels have to surrender to sins of gluttony. The culinary match has just ended.

Directed and curated by

Lemonot

with

Arianna Zamparelli

Palma Bucarelli

Marianna Morreale

Federico Armeni

Leone Hadavi

Federico Angeloni

Zobeide Hadavi

Tommaso Riccitelli

Carlotta Dotto

Anna Previte

Alessandra Frustaci

Rita Elvira Adamo

Felix Doeple

Video

Filippo Bonza Brachetti

CIRCOLO PALERMITANO

Inhabitable bench

@Countless Cities Biennial

CIRCOLO PALERMITANO

Inhabitable bench

@Countless Cities Biennial

Palermo,

2021

"Circolo Palermitano" is a direct, playful representation of Piazza della Martorana. Combining its iconicity with a sophisticated geometrical construction, we create a new trio of modular wooden benches, constructed with CnC-ed pieces cut from 18mm plywood panels. Each bench is conceived as a small architecture, so as to trigger a symbolic and spatial dialogue between the scale of the city and the human body. The benches are indeed inhabitable, formed by permeable ribbed tunnels, culminating with open domes that can be detached - becoming funny architectural costumes.

This trio of wooden animals can be arranged into a linear interlocked scheme - made possible by a peculiar silhouette in plan - or into an open configuration that frames a proper playground. People can physically engage with urban furniture in unconventional ways. We think that, after the last months, it's now time to re-invent how to inhabit public space, envisioning new, performative, playful relationships between citizens and the urban fabric - to creatively question the current usage of our bodies.

Circolo Palermitano embraces everyone who knows, or wants to discover, how to play. Kids, due to their privileged body proportions and imaginative capacity, are the primary players, but everyone is welcome to sit, indulge and see through the holes!

Lemonot

TRIBAL CANDELA

Inhabitable sculpture

@Neuchatel Competition

TRIBAL CANDELA

Inhabitable sculpture

@Neuchatel Competition

Mexico City,

2020

Ten meters high, Tribal Candela is a form of permanent ars topiaria, an habitable metal sculpture, covered with the purple flowers of jacaranda trees which help to mitigate the environmental pollution and introduce buffering microclimatic variations in the city by nature.

Among the crowded streets, tribal candela becomes a shaded space to hide from the chaotic noise of the city. An urban soft canopy which resembles the thin shells, popularly known as cascarones, designed by Felix Candela.

The curve that rises upwards becomes a point of reference and meeting place - a spatial and sensorial experience through strong colours and smells. It is an architecture that makes you want to look up, through the opening cone to the sky.

Tribal candela invites you in, capturing your gaze in ordinary moments: from the outside it moves as if it was breathing, the leaves change color and are shaken by the wind, catching the viewer’s eye - framing the environment and the sky around

Tribal candela is a piece of work which becomes interactive through the users moving throughout the piece, changing character depending on the needs of the people. A space for the community to be used yet intimate and unique.

Once you enter, the sound of the frenetic city outside is muffled. You can use the space as a moment of peace, of play, of conversation or waiting. Tribal Candela is also a platform for observing people wandering from one sidewalk to another, shops opening and closing, cars and street vendors. A platform to observe daily rituals in Mexico city. A place to enhance everyday life; in a space that changes and evolves daily, where the users are the main protagonists.

The petals of the vaulted dome are constructed with a reticular steel structure, cladded with colourful and crafted textiles. The dome supports an actual topiary piece made of thin steel cage which lets the jacaranda flowers grow naturally through time.

Lemonot

with

Federico Fauli

Images

Federico Fauli

Diego Ariza

MONUMENTALLY AUTOMATIC

Play

Exhibition and Performance

@ Baan Rim Nam

MONUMENTALLY AUTOMATIC

Exhibition and Performance

@ Baan Rim Nam

Bangkok Design Week,

2020

Henrietta Moore: “the future learning will not be about the transferability of whole models with known outcomes, but rather about incomplete learning, experimentation and collaboration.”

Monumentally Automatic is an photographic survey, an exhibition and a performance constructed in two weeks - in collaboration with ten of the most iconic characters and shop owners in the old neighbourhood of Talad Noi, Bangkok.

Talad Noi is one of the most charming district in Bangkok as it still remain immersed in local traditions and lifestyle despite the city’s unceasing pace of development towards modernity. The neighbourhood remains almost hidden, in between the intertwined narrow streets there are many treasures to be discovered.

The growth of “Sieng Gong” started in the aftermath of Second World War when Talad Noi was one of the very important port area for the shipments from China. Conveniently located close to Yaowarat road, known as the ChinaTown of Bangkok, "Sieng Gong" is a secondhand engine machine centre, a sort of urban commercial storage for re-usable industrial parts from all around the world. with just about any automobile part you can imagine laying around ready to be sawed, welded or drilled and installed. Its tiny alleys are characterised by a series of multi-generation owned and operated Chinese-Thai shops, which look like statuary rooms, apparently frozen yet relentlessly changing, where these spare functioning parts are stored and preserved before being reused. These pieces are also accumulated outside on the street, creating a landscape of heterogeneous metallic piles. The layers of these piles can be seen as the constructed timeline of the neighbourhood’s history.

The first act of this project - the Field - is a series of portraits, of human characters and mechanical settings, aiming to emphasise the importance of these people, practices and places, which should be considered as identitarian for Bangkok’s past and future. This photographic investigation, initiated during the BkkDW2020 and still in progress, ultimately attempts to highlight the nature of "Sieng Gong" as a spontaneous cultural lab, where the sellers, by relentlessly performing their daily routines, become unconscious yet active crafters of a collective, peculiar, iconographical palimpsest.

Monumentally Automatic wants to emphasize the importance of these people, practices and places, which should be considered as identitarian for Bangkok’s past and future. We approached the oldest sellers and we involved them in cataloging and untangling their mountains in order to build a public catalog of all these pieces. The installation was a collective process of assembling pieces together with a final auction where for the first time they came to explain their story and share their hard work, selling the parts not as mechanical fragments but as art pieces. The first act of this projects, initiated during the BkkDW2020, ultimately aims to highlight the nature of Sieng Gong as a spontaneous cultural lab, where the sellers, by relentlessly performing their daily routines, become unconscious yet active crafters of a collective, peculiar, iconographical palimpsest.

Regardless of the amount of available space inside the stores, in "Sieng Gong" the automated pieces are also accumulated outside on the street, informally appropriating the public ground and creating a landscape of heterogeneous metallic mountains. Despite appearing as utterly chaotic agglomerations, the fragments are thoroughly categorised within the pile-ups: each shop owner has a meticulous mind map to detect where all the different pieces are in the enormous heaps, knowing by heart their position according to the purpose. Whenever a new customer walks in requesting a particular part to fix a car, truck, motorcycle or machine, awaiting parts are immediately ready for the shop owner to dive through. This spatial frameworks and selling procedures create a peculiar atmosphere, establishing a very close contact between those who pass (the spectators) and those who live there (the unconscious actors). There are an incredible amount of tones and layers to be found in this community, not only in terms of shops & wares, but also because of the unique residents themselves.

The second act of the project - the Auction - was unfolded through the re-enactment of Tald Noi’s artificial landscape inside the premises of Baan Rim Naam during the BkkDW 2020 and through a series of designed performances to blend artistic and utilitarian practices. Indeed, all the features characterising the selling of these car fragments come with a spontaneously rich iconographical apparatus - behaviours, tools, gestures, spatial accumulations - that deserves to be represented and explored within the context of an immersive exhibition.

The role of art in this project is to dignify these contextual protocols as unexpected forms of beauty, while simultaneously enhance the commercial needs that generated them. Therefore, while the spectators were immersed within this naturally synthetic stage-set to appreciate its evocative mixite’, there were different happenings - culminating with an evening when artists, together with local shop owners, were selling the fragments both as extravagant objects and as actual functioning car parts. An hybrid live auction for an heterogenous public. A landscape that appears chaotic, while it’s an expressive but precise archive - a geometrical pattern organised to recall a specific aesthetic, yet primarily and meticulously dictated by the functionality of the pieces. This is a performative portrait to celebrate contemporary "Sieng Gong" in Talad Noi.

Directed and curated by

Lemonot

with

Pam Anantrungroj

Nithikorn Plawan

Photos

Prin Tumsatan

GLUTTONY’S TRIUMPH

Artist residency

@Insula Lab

GLUTTONY’S TRIUMPH

Artist residency

@Insula Lab

Palermo,

2020

Designed and constructed by

Lemonot

Photos

Giulia Granvillano

HOU GOU FONDUE

Inhabi-Table

@Foodculturedays_competition

HOU GOU FONDUE

Inhabi-Table

@Foodculturedays_competition

Vevey,

2019

All I want is a bowl of chop suey, A bowl of chop suey and you-ey, A cozy little table for two-ey, With a bowl of chop suey and you-ey. For a place that’s very Chinesy Is nice for a hug and squeezy, Where we can do a billion coo-eys With a bowl of chop suey for two-ey. Ben Bernie, Alyce Goering, and Walter Bullock, “A Bowl of Chop Suey and You-ey,” 1934, as performed by Sam Robbins and his Hotel McAlpin Orchestra

China was the first to attempt export of goods/ culture on a massive global scale with the Silk Roads. The trade routes not only became a way of exchange of goods but subsequently transformed into veins pumping culture, from one place to another. Food, music, art, language can be traced travelling this physical networks around the globe, in some cases adapted and re-appropriated whilst at others displacing what was once the norm.

The Silk Roads set the basis of a huge change from local to global, from intra to inter - globalisation; a word that has re-emerged as a concept with the boom of the internet and infrastructure and has overshadowed the world from early 90’s until today. Massive debates on the pros and cons - an open free market, cultural and material cross pollination, access to a global economy where countries have a voice outside the context they have operated for centuries. With the evolution of technology, the spread of knowledge, exchange nurtured this massive spread of ideas from micro to macro scale, from local to global. A dish invented in a street market somewhere could be scaled up into a world-wide phenomenon.

Yet the negative effects of this free movement of ideas, products, dishes infiltrating into different worlds and cultures has been alarming for some. The once tiny dish served in one area, scaled up and exported into different contexts cities overshadowing and ‘killing’ the local. Corporations capitalising on this dishes which in a way substitute local culture dishes and eliminating them.

This in particular has caused another movement against global food, against the faceless ‘corporation’ wanting to preserve the local cultures. Yet what is really local? We are at the point now that we are agonising on notions of authenticity, locality and truth. The term itself has often become a marketing construct to sell a product which has no longer a true identity. Locality has been bought by large corporations, wrapped and packaged and resold to the public.

Our project looks at how the Lazy Susan, an invention made in the US to share food on the table. It was exported and assimilated within China then re-exported back into the world. Our fascination with China and its long history exporting culture becomes the departure point and the main trigger for the Hou Gou table. We looked into Chinatowns and how these micro depictions of the mainland, emerge in every major city, showing how the country operates and handles physical and conceptual territory to establish itself in foreign lands.

This phenomenon of Chinese micro worlds, in cities around the world became the basis for our speculative fiction. Exotic islands floating against western cities, bright luscious red colours, exuberant pagodas and mythical dragons of the far east floating within our western cities of brick. We were interested not only in how their rich recipes and dishes are consumed within foreign territories but also how China has found a recipe to establish itself in the built environment and create a strong identity which can be easily replicated, pasted and appropriated around the world. Starting from a dish such as the hot pot, scaling up to the table, interior, street and whole building blocks, it has generated a robust presence and a business paradigm like no other. China has managed to export these conceptual islands to the rest of the world creating an archipelago of culture which infiltrates and enriches our cities.

Lemonot

with

Urban radicals

Alberto Gramigni

TUTTI FRUTTI

Social table

@Ciciri via Lattarini

TUTTI FRUTTI

Social table

@Ciciri via Lattarini

Palermo,

2019

Lemonot

with

Francesca Leone

Francesca Malleo

PORTABLE CHOLETS

Play

Workshop and performance

@AAvs El Alto

PORTABLE CHOLETS

Workshop and performance

@AAvs El Alto

El Alto,

2019

Portable Cholets: La mesa wants to experiment with anthropomorphic languages, ritualistic usages and composite video-editing - to re-enact part of the festive equipment that inspire and populate Freddy Mamani’s architectures.

Cholets are a privileged testing ground for these qualities: how can folkloric masks and costumes trigger an effective architectural cycle where inhabitation and aesthetic languages become mutually exclusive?

What is unique at a time where superficial otherness seems to have become the standard, where vernacular spontaneity has been replaced by overconstructed only polished photoshop images? El Alto gives us the opportunity to conceive architecture as a performative act - enabling the mutual immanence between bodies and spaces, objects and ceremonies. For us, performing fulfills necessities that have little to do with practical efficiency or quantitative variables. Rather, it is an evocative tool to activate symbolic links, to claim back identitarian needs and to depict qualitative hedonistic traits into physical spatial compounds.

Taught and directed by

Lemonot

with

Patricio Crooker

Marcos Loayza

Freddy Mamani Silvestre

AAvs students

Video

Alma Films

THE CARNIVAL TABLE

Play

Inhabi-Table

@Hellowood Festival

THE CARNIVAL TABLE

Inhabi-Table

@Hellowood Festival

Csóromfölde,

2019

In a contemporary society that is dangerously drifting towards alienation, mainstream architecture offers very little resistance. On one hand, massive real estate developments impose highly standardized forms governed by the logics of marketing. On the other hand, starchitects impose their superficial signature in an endless effort to be different from the competition. The actual users end up inhabiting spaces that represent very little - if nothing - of themselves. Ikea knick-knacks are the last resort to give a resemblance of identity to their homes.

Carnival was born as a temporary inversion of social conventions - can we speculate on how to invert reactionary architectural conventions? We want to use the ritual of eating and the symbolic power of a dining table - a place where people meet at the same level - in order to discard conventions and encourage a different practice of design, rooted in conviviality and freedom. By uncovering symbolic and social constructions through food, we aim to prompt a debate rich of symbolic explanations about human behaviour and rituals.

The table is an ancient place of unity, cohesion, equal exchange. Around the table the man enjoyed, rejoiced, but above all he told. From Plato's Symposium to Dante's Convivio, the stories that have been handed down before a meal are those that have invented and narrated the world.

We believe that it’s time for architecture to establish a new intimacy with its users, to become more human, to create culture and foster social interaction. With our Carnival table, we want architecture to provide space for self-expression instead of uniformity. We want architecture to draw people together instead of isolating them. We want architecture to be able to create stories again.

Designed and constructed by

Lemonot

with

Space Saloon

Collective Plant

Photos

Zsuzsa Darab