THE LONG RUN

Public Theatre

@London Festival of Architecture (Finalist)

THE LONG RUN

Public Theatre

@London Festival of Architecture (Finalist)

London,

2022

“A system of theatrical organization whereby the play performed runs as long as there is an audience for it.”

The long-run is a modular space that can be assembled in three different configurations to put in dialogue the public space with the people who inhabit it. It is a sort of “thrust stage” - a platform that protrudes into the audience. In the same way, we are constructing this device that invites the audience to appropriate the stage and make use of Phoenix Road and shared roads and streets. The long-run is a theatrical device composed of nine wooden benches, which are held together by 18 poles where at the top we find a small knob that reminds us of the finials and washing lines and pegs of Somers town. The finials of “The long-run are simultaneously identitarian and functional elements: they work as parts of a simple pulley system for the benches, as anchor points for cables and for potential shading canopies.

This public performative platform can be adjusted in scale and be assembled in different conformations depending on the desired activity. The first configuration is a platform 7.2 x7.2 m which can be used for chatting, laying down, picnics and playing. If lifted, the benches form a seating area - a conversation pit. Here a series of canvases and drapes can be attached on each side to allow students to draw, sketch and present. In collaboration with Scene & heard the space can be used throughout the two weeks of intense playwriting weekend, where children with dramaturgs rehearse their plays. In that case, the space is enclosed and the drapes become an ever changing cyclorama.

The stage set acts as a public affirmation space for children and adults to witness their creativity. And when the play is ready to be shown, the thrust stage becomes a seating stall/tribune, inviting the public to see the play in this third arrangement. The long-run, due to its simple profile, could be adapted to multiple sites - our proposal is to place it as a congregational bridge between the public sidewalk of Phoenix Road and the currently unused garden of Oakshott Court. “From grey to green” - we believe that the first act of this process should be about valorising the multiple existing green spaces of Somers Town. We want to create a device that can be recognized as a point of reference, a meeting place in the neighbourhood to socialise, rest and play which makes you aware of the importance of public streets, making it a space of permanence rather than just a passage.

During the weekend of Phoenix road closure, we will disassemble the stage into a long table that occupies the whole street. The fourth configuration will see a tea ceremony as in the past - a magnificent 64.8 metre collective pathar mangshor jhol on a Sunday. Moments of ordinary life will be emphasised and brought to life by the creative daily use of this long-run.

Lemonot

with

Gianmarco Dolfi

Camilla Tinti

GASTRONOMIC PALAPA

Play

Edible pavilion

@Mextropoli Festival (1st Prize)

GASTRONOMIC PALAPA

Edible pavilion

@Mextropoli Festival (1st Prize)

Mexico City,

2021

"La comida, más que las especulaciones místicas, es una manera segura de acercarse a un pueblo y a su cultura" Octavio Paz.

The Complejo Cultural Los Pinos, once the Mexican presidential house, from September 2021 to March 2022 became the context for Gastronomic Palapa - a temporary polysemic place - a temporary pavilion design for Mextropoli 2020 in Alameda Central and then built there one year later due to the pandemic.

A public chillies dryer A convivial cathedral of sounds, smells and colours A collective mesa at the urban scale

The pavilion is mainly composed of two parts: a triangulated support structure and a playful accumulation of evolving, changeable organic elements. Completely filled with Chiles Secos and red Zacates, it forms an inverted thatched roof that acts as a communal palapa.

The infrastructure draws indeed inspiration from vernacular Mexican palapas, yet it introduces a clear directionality that recalls the spatial organisation of certain spiritual places: after a compressed - both in height (2.60 m) and width (3.20 m) - entrance, the interiors of this urban chapel rise constantly, towards a relatively tall (6.80 m) and large (9.00 m of diameter) circular apsis, that culminates in a central oculus. It is not constructed with traditional materials like wood and straw, but using just one type of steel angle profile (3x3 inches) - mostly as a simple “V”, or paired as a “T” for the main structure and as an “X” for the legs and the spine.

The pavilion covers an area of 108sqm2. The chillies knotted together define a variegated cloister where glimmers of light draw geometric and organic shadows on the ground, inviting the visitor to enter and experience this multi-sensorial enfilade. The interiors are painted in bright red, while the exteriors are characterised by a quieter grey: this is the main perceptual form of hierarchy for an otherwise very porous space, in strong continuity with its surroundings. There is a series of tables, conceived as overflowing tongues - sticking out from the narrow openings. These three bright red mesas (tables) act as bridges to connect interior and exterior, as privileged surfaces to linger, indulge, look through the colourful beams and to be in direct contact with thousands of edible assemblages.

Gastronomic Palapa performed as a public pantry. It contained rows of hung zacates – more than 1500 – and threads of chiles secos – almost 11000!. These were its main material elements, the ones which constructed its edible iconographical apparatus. Throughout the days, the chillies became brittle when touched and their seeds were heard inside when shaken. Some of them kept on drying, others were sheltered yet partially exposed to the weather: these processes triggered a series of time-based transformations throughout the months, providing unexpected colours, textures and smells - turning the ceiling of the pavilion into a living architectural compound.

The pavilion has just been dismantled and it’s waiting to be re-constructed in a different place in Mexico City. It will again act as an urban pantry or dryer, sheltering new organic, edible fragments. Its assembling and disassembling will always be participatory acts, naturally happening as gigantic collective banquets.

Its main aim is to stimulate people's inventiveness, to become a stage set for spontaneous performances, rather than being a static pavilion that visitors can just contemplate. Gastronomic Palapa wants to delineate a truly interactive, polysemic space, that internalises and augments multiple degrees of publicness. It is an alive shelter to foster instinctive behaviours and to re-write daily, bodily gestures, re-connecting them with unconventional architectural components and materials. It is an architecture to be appropriated and to be bodily consumed.

Designed and curated by

Lemonot

with

Federico Fauli

Anna Adrià

Josue Daniel

La invencible

Photos and Videos

Jose Jasso

Erika Garcia

IL GRANATAIO

Performative pavilion

@Spazi Sospesi (Honorable Mention)

IL GRANATAIO

Performative pavilion

@Spazi Sospesi (Honorable Mention)

Firenze,

2021

"Granataio" ( from "granata", which in Tuscany means "broom") is designed as a theatrical machine for the public space of Piazza Luigi della Piccola, consisting of 8 inhabitable and reconfigurable benches. It is a light, geometric and modular infrastructure, covered with 388 brooms - whose branched, resistant and flexible broomsticks shape a peculiar interplay between light and shadows across the entire pavilion. The brooms are recognisable elements from the everyday that invite you to enter this square: with its fibrous, raw and natural consistency, Granataio stands out against the rationalist and imposing background of the student residence.

The pavilion is fluid in form, in materials, but above all in use. As in a game at the scale of architecture, you can move the benches and you can have fun planning collectively different ways of meeting and sharing. More open for artistic performances, more enclosed and intimate for the workshops where you need to concentrate.

The 8 benches are built with plywood panels hooked to a structure in metal tubulars, on which 3 or 4 radial series of inclined brooms are screwed. The set of movable wings on wheels is sufficiently light (the weight of the brooms, per bench, does not exceed 60 kg) to be moved by two people. Each bench is an eighth of an asymmetrical circle, with the two ends of different sizes: one of 45 cm and the other of 135 cm.

When they are all side by side, the benches form an intimate and completely shaded space on the perimeter. However, this is only one of the possible spaces: like sails that plow the square, the wings can be repositioned with ease, creating multiple configurations that support the movements, desires and needs of those who populate the neighbourhood.

Granataio invites a direct exchange between people and the spatial artefact, stimulating a particular process of circularity within the neighbourhood: when the pavilion needs to be dismantled, everyone that has a relationship with the square - business owners students and all residents - will have the opportunity to get a broom, bringing home a piece of the pavilion, to continue to take care both of their households and of Piazza Dallapiccola.

The brooms become the symbol of the emotional and material continuity between the public sphere and the domestic space. The benches, “undressed”, will remain in the square, offering the opportunity to linger and rest that is now missing, while the metal structures can be the basis for swings and other games for children.

Lemonot

with

Camilla Tinti

Gianmarco Dolfi

SERMIENTO

Performative pavilion

@Concentrico Festival (Finalist)

SERMIENTO

Performative pavilion

@Concentrico Festival (Finalist)

Logroño,

2021

The project starts by a simple ritual: storing and reusing sarmientos - branches that are usually trimmed in winter time as a preparation for the vine season. We will collect the bunches from Bodega LAN and nearby wineries to turn them into a construction material. We want to celebrate these leftovers that are usually crammed and burned, by building a theatrical backdrop to the vineyard and El Rincón - able to welcome the visitors into its branches. The singular bunches, once accumulated into a curved, natural yet geometrical pile-up, create a vibrant space to be contemplated, touched and inhabited.

1200 bunches of sarmientos soar over the various trails and plots of Bodega LAN, highlighting the strong material relationship between the artefact and the context. They are interlocked within a wooden structure which is 16 meters long and more than 4 meters high. It acts as a skeleton for the sarmientos that, wrapping the entire structure, slightly cantilevered from its profile, create an heterogeneous natural cladding. This wall is composed of 14 vertical structural modules joined by 6 rows of horizontal bracing. Due to the modular grid structural system, it can be disassembled and built somewhere else in a short period of time. The overall wall dimensions can be adjusted and proportions can be calibrated. Its feet can also be adjusted on the topography of the landscape. The whole construction process can happen without the need of machineries but only through a slotting system mechanism.

The sarmientos stacked on top of each other invite glimmers of light to come through, drawing shadows on the ground and offering shelter from the sun inside the wooden niche. An oculus on one side frames the puente Mantible and the Ebro River. From the other side an enclosed window overlooks the vineyards, inviting people to sit on it and contemplate the grapevines. Its proportions are simultaneously generous and cozy: it becomes a refuge from which to observe the landscape and hear the sounds of nature.

The assembling and the dismantling is a collective process, in which the sarmiento bunches can be recycled either as compost for the grapevines or as embers for preparing a traditional asado.

Lemonot

with

OfficeShopHouse

CIRCOLO

Play

Performative meal

@casa di Belmondo

CIRCOLO

Performative meal

@casa di Belmondo

Belmonte Calabro,

2020

U miegghjiu cumpani è u pitittu. Appetite is the best side dish.

Who designed the lunch? Who did it? The guests, who have become actors and actresses, creating space rather than just inhabiting it - staging it. Their gestures - movements, glances and grunts - which activated abstract, otherwise dormant forms. However, this system of multiple relationships was suggested precisely by those dormant geometries - meant as neutral platforms to awaken intuition. The ingredients - artificial or organic, edible or nearly toxic - everyone juggled between. And then those who procured them for us, with patience, kindness, timeliness and mastery.

All we had to do was to blend everything as you would do in a complex recipe: one of those dishes with many flavors, which must all be distinguished. The intent was to portray different but compatible pieces of everyday life together, and to mix many stories around a large table set - at the scale of the landscape.

There was a great confusion, it seemed a cauldron of bodies, which, moving and eating together, built the space of their own stage. The pungent smell of salmoriglio was more present than the din of the diners. They all cackled, but with their hands, not with their voices: they were absorbed in a sort of industrious silence, busy grabbing and biting the wild cuttlefish, which, roasted on the grill. It was in that precise moment that a week of discussions about what were the role, the identity and the destiny of the Seppie di Belmondo came to a conclusion. The moist scent of pine bark - apparently crunchy, it made you want to eat that too - was a counterpoint to the coldness of the oxidized metal. Those hard and inflexible circles on top of the ground had been forged by a good giant like Gennaro, a blacksmith from Cosenza with such affable, soft manners. They were tables, pans and bowls, inviting but fortunately really rigid, the only cornerstones of that suddenly initiated dance. Everyone was swiftly going back and forth, finally aware of how to recognize the safe parts of the garden, where they could walk, sit and let themselves go. The Seppie and the roasted cuttlefish were scattered everywhere, but they also orbited around one of the round platforms to which that gastronomic procession was anchored. A little further on, there were heaps of colorful fried vegetables, cultivated with enthusiastic effort by Mariella among the ups and downs of Spineto and cooked following precisely all her suggestions. As a last, more orderly outpost, there was what could not be missing: a row of Belmonte tomatoes, cut into thick slices, arranged like colors on a palette and seasoned theatrically from above, as in a propitiatory dance. At first no one came close to them, since those tomatoes seemed so composed, almost inviolable - you could no more than dare to smell them. But then, as soon as someone started to creatively imagine ways to handle those deliberately inflated proportions, the whole symphony of cheerful disorder naturally started right there, from the tomatoes.

We wanted to construct a simple ritual, in which particular habits could emerge and adapt to each other, stimulated by the right architectural props. Actually we hoped, and it happened, that those who were there would eat and perform spontaneously. We didn’t aim to transfigure routines into exceptions, rather we aimed to finally reveal them as exceptional acts.

Directed and curated by Lemonot

with

La Rivoluzione delle Seppie

Photos

Silvia Gin

Nicola Barbuto

Luca Pitasi

Margherita Manfra

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

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