PREVIOUS WORKSHOPS
1.‘Performance Architecture School’ previous courses 2020, 2021
2.‘Performance Architecture’
MA Public Art, University of Porto Faculty of Fine Arts, March 2021
Invited by Prof. Gabriela V Pinheiro, Miguel Costa
This workshop was designed to support the students of the respected course in producing a spatial project set in a specific site during the Covid-19 pandemic and the relevant access restrictions. The focus was on understanding spatial realtities with our bodies, desires and imagination.
3.‘Performing Urbanism: Body, Movement, Space’
BA (Hons) Architecture, Central St Martin's (London College of Arts), part of 'Radical Arts & Critical Architecture', Invited by Orsalia Dimitriou, March 2019.
Lead by Orsalia Dimitriou, Eliza Soroga, Aliki Kylika
This workshop is designed to give an alternative, critical view to the study, use and production of space in both an urban and architectural scale. The focus is placed in applying tools from the genre of performance (theatre, film, dance and performance art) on the architectural thinking and process in order to produce spatial actions and bodily geometries in space.
4.Site Specific Art Workshop, City as landscape body as subject: Athens, January 2019
Supported by 9th ATHENS VIDEO DANCE PROJECT Annual Videodance Festival in collaboration with the Theater of Athens School of Fine Arts.
Taught by Eliza Soroga and Guest Tutor Anastasia Karandinou
A 4-day Site-Specific workshop incorporating the reality of the chosen site within Athens’s rich urban landscape. Structured on image composition methodologies aims to challenge the body as a response to the chosen site. Referencing ‘Expanding Theatre’, the idea that the whole world is a stage -Theatrum Mundi- and the passersby as performers in their everyday life where boarders between performance and real life are blurred. Introducing the compositional approach ‘Site-Specific Outdoor’ where the space constitutes the prima material of the work and the concept derives from an interactive dialogue with the site, allowing it to form its content, research and evolution.
The outcomes produced were exhibited at Athens School of Fine Arts part of 9th ATHENS VIDEO DANCE PROJECT Annual Videodance Festival.
5.Corporal Shapes: A Performative Approach to Space.
Year 1 Department of Architecture. University of East London in collaboration with V&A Museum of Childhood London, November 2018. Number of students: 70.
Lead by performance artist Eliza Soroga & performance architect Aliki Kylika
Photos taken during the workshop were exhibited from March 2019 at the V&A Museum of Childhood.
‘Corporal shapes’ is a workshop for students of the UEL School of Architecture that aims to explore the indoor reality of the Museum of Childhood from a performative viewpoint. Using ‘Performance Making’ approaches and methodologies we worked on activating our senses and our embodied spatial awareness. In this process we exercise our perception of scale differences between adults, children and crowds, we are challenging existing thresholds whilst suggesting new ones and comprehend the importance of the gaze and of viewpoints in the experience of space. The outcome is a series of spatial proposals performed with the body as a physical sketch.
6.'Performing Architecture: Body, Movement, Space, BA (Hons) Architecture, Central St Martin's (London College of Arts), part of 'Radical Arts & Critical Architecture'
Lead by Orsalia Dimitriou, Eliza Soroga, Kyveli Anastasiadi
https://vimeo.com/332294066
Part of Viral Institute of Performance Architecture (VIPA)
This workshop is aimed at and tailored for students of architecture and spatial design. Its purpose is to reconnect the students back to a way of designing that uses the body as an instrument of thinking, sensing, drawing and sculpting space, accessing an intelligence that is spherical rather than linear. The workshop combines architecture with other disciplines including art, cinematography and performance with the aim to inspire, broaden and challenge the spheres of what is possible and what is considered ΄normal'.
7.Making Week at Central Saint Martins 2018
Lead by STUDIO SYN
In February 2018 Studio SYN lead a group of second and third year BA students at Central Saint Martins’ Making Week. During the week-long intense design and making process, the students designed a number of bespoke timber joints, developed a construction sequence, compiled cutting templates, produces prototypes and prepared digital files for large scale production.
https://vimeo.com/2572891725.
8.Four Corners of the World, STORE’s Summer School 2018 in Dalston
Lead by STUDIO SYN
Ursula and Dejan of Studio SYN teamed up with Erika and Anders of Office TEN to to form a tutor team and lead the fourth STORE’s architectural summer school that took place at Dalston’s Gillett Square, London in July and August 2018. STORE’s London Summer School. Through material testing and immediate engagement with an active urban site, we explored architecture, art practice and performance to understand the dynamics of public space. This year’s designs were developed in collaboration with Hackney Pirates, a storytelling group local to the area. The summer school culminated in a celebratory performance by InforMotion.
https://vimeo.com/285915847
9.Elements of Space
Lead by VIPA
‘Elements of Space’ is a workshop, part of our on-going and broader research, exploring a way of ‘thinking’ and ‘making’ which comes from the human body and its spherical intelligence when implemented as a tool for thinking, drawing, sculpting, measuring and representing space.
The workshop is constructed as a 5hour sequence of tasks that lead up to the creation of a new space model that re-interprets a chosen element of our built environment in relation to the human body and its spatial experience. Appropriate warm-up exercises and discussions help the participants to mentally and physically, openly and creatively engage with the tasks given.
On 15/10/2016 ‘Elements of Space’ took place in Arebyte Gallery as part of the ongoing exhibition by Rosana Antoli ‘Virtual Choreography’.
The element that was explored in this version of the Workshop was the element of thresholds: entrances, exits and other openings of architectural space.
Throughout the day many subjects came up and offered ground for thought, discussion and creativity:
The rhythm of space itself, its physical interpretation and the rhythm of the body when inhabiting the space, the visual choreography of architecture.
10. Understanding Territories; A social approach to building walls.
October 2018, PortoA Workshop written and ran by VIPA, as part of the Course Politics of Survival: Spirit, Matter and Modes
Coletivo PLÁKA
COMMISSIONED BY: Câmara Municipal do Porto
ORGANISED BY: Carlos Costa, Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro and Jorge Palinhos
The workshop ‘Understanding Territories’ looked at the creation of boundaries as a communal ritual in order to restore the long standing experience of building walls as a society in harmony, to understand their purpose and what they truly represent. Compelled by the recent political debates about walls and borders, this workshop has been an attempt to shed some light to the performative substance of borders and their everyday spatial expression.
Protecting vs Confining / Inviting vs Excluding / Open vs Solid; borders, walls or lines are the fundamental element for defining space and therefore a fundamental element of human life. From the borders of a country to the confinement of our own room we live within ‘walls’ of different kinds that we build together, with others and alone within ourselves. Marking territories has been connected to performance since ancient times, with related rituals in most civilizations across the globe. Limits, thresholds, passages and crossroads have gained a symbolic power within ancient customs, folklore rituals, and medieval processes, up to today.
The experience gave an understanding of the psychological parameters involved when working within a group and being included or excluded from a territory. Feelings of worthiness, responsibility, fear, uncertainty, restraint, detachment, anger, competition, comradery and determination were exhibited, that actively highlighted the context of some of the social behaviours noticeable in the contested politics of our times. The process of making a physical structure with simple means activated not only the imagination and creativity of the participants, but also the vital tool of collaboration for a collective future.