METTICI LA FACCIA

Exhibition and Performance

@Archi Fest Singapore

METTICI LA FACCIA

Exhibition and Performance

@Archi Fest Singapore

Singapore,

2019

“I cannot do a building without building a new repertoire of characters, of stories, of language and it’s all parallel. It’s not just building per se. It’s building worlds” J. Hejduk

We have been affected by a strange form of spatial Pareidolia. We are obsessively looking for anthropomorphic traces - hidden in the built apparatus that shapes the world. Our designs could not exist without the invention of the bizarre troupe supposed to populate them. Their stories, fears and love affairs intimately inform the architectural substance itself. Each building becomes a peculiar persona.

We practice only forms of knowledge based on physical experience: direct or emerged through the tangible re-enactment of empirical conditions. Speculation isn’t understood as pure invention or as a biased device to fill the gaps left by our uncertainties, but as a lens to frame and relentlessly process reality through design culture. The project is a journey articulated through a series of spatial performances. For us, performing has 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.

The design process is nurtured through the assemblage of composite filters to enhance or alterate the human perception of coexisting beings, objects and spaces. Through a palimpsest of precise drawings and short films, we engaged with the architectural effects they produced on the real. The performative representation of space, together with its peculiar synthases and syntax, is an effective tool for a linguistic self-liberation: architects are provided with an appropriate vocabulary that finally re-connects them with a wider public.

Directed and curated by

Lemonot

with

Federico Armeni

Palma Bucarelli

Arianna Zamparelli

Simone Salviati

Tommaso Riccitelli

Gianluca Lorenzini

Vincenzo Morreale

Stacy Peh

Video

Agnese Sumonte

LIBIDINAL PERSPECTIVES

Micro tools – Suitcase

@Milan Design Week

LIBIDINAL PERSPECTIVES

Micro tools - Suitcase

@Milan Design Week

Milan,

2019

Our tools are our references. Our references are our obsessions. As hedonistic adventurers, we could only work through those - our obsessions are the only burden that we carry around. We haunt for patterns which are forged by the anatomy of pleasure, forms shaped through irreverent gestures and everything that speaks of an erotic language. We wallow in foam, asking blacksmiths to fabricate creamy glaze. Fond of tactile smells, we confused the carver with a mysterious mixologist. We love to objectify – to transform ideas literally and wildly into an apparatus of built dreams. Our working table is a potluck between production and consumption - front and back – depression and euphoria.

In how many ways you can use a pair of boobs? Porn for the privileged, Architecture for Everyone.

Designed and constructed by

Lemonot

Exhibition

KooZA/rch

(Ab)Normal

PERENNIAL TOPIARY

Interactive sculpture

@Asa Exhibition

PERENNIAL TOPIARY

Interactive sculpture

@Asa Exhibition

Bangkok,

2019

Welcome to the Anthropocene, in today’s overwhelming global evidence that atmospheric, geologic, hydrologic, biospheric and other earth system processes are now altered by humans, perennial topiary is a collection of possible solutions, projections, rejections, moments which are worth to share globally.

We defined ecology not only restricted to our environment but as well on subcultures, ethical scarcity and money excess. Realities that most of the time are underneath our eyes and just not been picked up upon. The more that we forget, the more we do not care.

In this Perennial Topiary everytime that a flower is picked up, a thread of needed knowledge is shaped. One flower is one project. We will construct our topiary out of hundreds of projects. Curiosity to raise awareness.

Designed and costructed

Lemonot

with

Khine Thin Aye

Ann Pavinee Langenskiöld

Pang Nontavatit

Pai Prima

ANTHROPOTYPES

Play

Masks and performance

@AA Summer School

ANTHROPOTYPES

Masks and performance

@AA Summer School

London,

2018

Smithfield Meat Market and Billingsgate Fish Market, two insulated worlds, rich and raw – London’s history. 12 newcomers, a 3am visit. Livers, kidneys, intestines, pig trotters – invading all the senses. Fish scales, ice, styrofoam boxes, tentacles – an array of colours and textures.

Fragments, moments and interactions inform a dialogue with the markets – seemingly random elements stand apart, forming narratives and personalities – Anthropotypes. Born from impressions, interrogations and above all, interactions in the market – four new characters from these faceted little worlds emerged.

The Wanderer from the East – an outsider, searching for a common language. The Grinder – constantly monitoring the ongoings at Smithfield, keeping intruders away. Faceless – the quiet soul of the market, seeking the exotic beauty that exists within. The High Priest of Billingsgate – delivering the fishy beings from sea to plate with empathy.

And finally a tasty potluck supper club. A peculiar snapshot of London and a few of its multiple selves – our crafted Anthropotypes.

“This fish soup is bland. Could you pass me the salt?” “Don’t do that.” “This is an eel soup, you will scare them.” “This is an eel soup, you will scare them.” “What do you mean? The eels are dead. I can’t scare them, I am eating them.” “Really? You’ve never heard this?!” “The eels are never dead, they fluctuate between life and afterlife.” “Come on! That’s crap! And then – what about the salt?” “The salt reminds them of his face.” “The salt reminds them of him.” “Him?Who?” “Him!” “Who?” “Him!” “I don’t understand.” “He’s the feeder.” “He’s the killer.” “He holds the cabinet.” “He prepares the coffin.” “I don’t believe you, I will just eat the soup.” “Well, just pay respect to him – he’s the High Priest of Billingsgate.”

Taught and directed by

Lemonot

with

Maghnild Kennedy

Marie Riime

Lorenzo Vitturi

Video

AA students

DESIGNING INFORMALITY

Play

INDA workshop and exhibition

@H Gallery

DESIGNING INFORMALITY

INDA workshop and exhibition

@H Gallery

Bangkok,

2020

Bangkok streets are lined with ubiquitous stalls, makeshift kitchens and a large variety of temporary structures selling different food, clothes, and electronic gadgets. This urban condition represents the continuation of a long-standing tradition of informal trade within the community. In such a context, we see informality as an effective response to pre-conceived societal structures, as an instrument to re-organise political and formal imposed conditions. It is rooted in people’s daily life, producing its own social, economic and cultural sphere, manifested through symbolically charged objects and mundane rituals.

The purpose of the workshop was to identify the appropriate design categories to grasp informality into an architectural device. This happened through a speculation built on the pamphlet “Street Food Funeral”, that led to the construction of an inhabitable chariot for a fictional gastronomic requiem: treated as typological device, the chariot became an hybrid synthesis between a market stall and a religious baldaquin.

Researching what the markets already offer, sell and display - we attempted to find a precise logic to curate a variable organization of goods, without misrepresenting the informality and spontaneity of the outcome.

We asked the students to determine the chariot’s architectural conditions, producing a spatial scaffolding to challenge the relationship between the different actors meant to inhabit it: sellers, monks, musicians, guests and pedestrians. Testing a series of imaginary rituals, the ground floor of the H gallery was transformed into a stage-set for happenings and informal gatherings. We thus highlighted the mutual influence between people’s behaviours and designed elements.

The students were encouraged to relentlessly assemble and disassemble a collective product, developing design and construction skills related to the field of movable structures. Particular attention was dedicated to the artisanal crafting of specific ornamental and functional components, to understand the deep connection among aesthetics, mechanisms and spontaneous reactions.

Taught and curated by

Lemonot

with

INDA students

Photos

Prin Tumsatan

STREET FOOD FUNERAL

Play

INDA urban mural

@WTF Gallery

STREET FOOD FUNERAL

INDA urban mural

@WTF Gallery

Bangkok,

2018

The mural is a response to the progressive disappearance of Thai street food culture, imposed by the government. It is a representation of its history and its funeral.

“Yet this week, in an attempt to impose some order on the capital’s famed tourist road, the Thai authorities ordered all street vendors selling food, clothes and trinkets to clear off the pavements during the day. “ The Guardian, 2018

“In Bangkok’s Fragrant Street Food, City Planners See a Mess to Clean City planners prefer a more manicured Bangkok, with air-conditioning, malls and Instagrammable dessert cafes — and without the mess and noise of street vendors.” [...] Already, the number of areas designated for street food has decreased from 683 three years ago to 175, according to the Network of Thai Street Vendors for Sustainable Development. [...] “If they want to get rid of us, we can’t do anything to protest because it’s the law,” Ms. Somboon said. “But Bangkok to me is about street food. Without it, it wouldn’t feel the same.” New York Times, 2018

“Thai values on living is a language that has a persuasion and sweet sound. The food they eat is also one persuasion too. But it isn’t just only attract the eyes because it is a traditional way of preparing food in a better way than buying food from a convenience store. But what the government is doing is hurting Bangkok by changing the colorful and beautiful chaos in Bangkok into a boring space to buy food as we are seeing now.” David Thompson (Thai food expert), 2018

“We know each other because of our hunger. You are so chill, we can meet in every place that we want and everytime you make me impressed and gain new experience. “You” - who we are talking about - are “street food”. It doesn’t matter if we’re rich or poor. We already met. We have known street food since we were kids. My grandma always took care of my food, she alway asked me “what are you going to eat today?” until now. [...] Money is the illusion Rice and fish is reality” Street Food Funeral, 2018

Taught and curated by

Lemonot

with

INDA students

Video

Tony

CULTURAL ASSEMBLING

Play

Workshop and exhibition

@AAvs El Alto

CULTURAL ASSEMBLING

Workshop and exhibition

@AAvs El Alto

Crucero del Sur _ El Alto,

2018

The AA Visiting School El Alto questions the ideas of identity, folklore translated into architecture – that becomes thus a collision among multiple symbolic fragments, far beyond its disciplinary boundaries and conventional testing grounds.

Act 1 - Defragmenting We started constructing a new architectural artefact in a chaotic process of fragmentation and re-assembly, transfiguring each element we would use, charging it with symbolic and aesthetic sense regarding the cultural power of the “Diablada of Oruro”. In the process of understanding this, we dived into the first week of the workshop to dismantle our own, identitarian fragments and combining them with a protagonist of the Diablada that was assigned to each one of us. The task was to take the essence out of the characters and ask ourselves: what defines that persona? Is it something visual, symbolic or both at the same time? What does that mask transcend in human nature? How can we make an ancient dance contemporary?

Act 2 - The Kingdom of Fragments The elements we selected and arranged did not work in a vacuum. We are all part of a bigger picture. The process of designing continued with the production of the surroundings. The context, made out of ceramics became our frame to play within. Each one of us had its own totem shaped out of geometrical cones, in different shades and sizes. Through these totems we fueled the design of the entire ground, where synthesis and syncretism aroused.

Act 3 - Assembling the choreography The last week we worked in one of the cholets of Freddy Mamani Silvestre. The place itself suggested us to make a centerpiece as in each of its buildings, the shapes and columns meet and intertwine almost in a knot right in the centre of the rooms. This centerpiece involved the assembly of the miniatures in a series of stages that resemble the sequence of building up any architectural project. The action of translating and appropriating objects, placing them in a new context gave a new symbology for our ground. We used objects as a medium to construct architecture. The whole project got unveiled through a performance, revealing the meaning of this ground: an inverted ceiling with a complex chandelier in the middle. Our painting became a fresco, our centerpiece – a chandelier, our totems - ceiling lights and our movements were trajectories to our ideas

Taught and curated by

Lemonot

with

Delphine Blast

Fernando Cajias

Ronal Grebe Crespo

Mario Sarabia

Freddy Mamani Silvestre

EDIBLE ARCHETYPES

Play

Exhibition and Performance @Festival of Creative Urban Living

EDIBLE ARCHETYPES

Artefacts and prototypes

@Festival of Creative Urban Living

Lisbon,

2017

Edible Archetypes begins with the Florentine Zuccotto, credited to be one of history’s first frozen desserts, and an “archetype” of the traditional Italian patisserie. With roots in Renaissance culinary history, the Zuccotto, or “pumpkin”, is a cream-filled pan di spagna sponge cake flavored with pink Alchermes liquor and covered in a chocolate ganache. Its shape is said to be derived from soldiers who used their helmets as a mould. Its appearance reminds us of a proper architectural archetype: the dome.

Beginning with Brunelleschi’s famous design for the dome of the Florence Cathedral, the largest brick dome in the world and a masterpiece of European architecture, Edible Archetypes aims to reinvent the Zuccotto through the lens of five different cities and their signature architectural domes. Each new recipe is developed as part of a typological investigation for an extravagant yet consistent family of dome-shaped cakes, creating a series of outcomes based on the combination of architectural variables and dessert construction

Rather than designing for food or with food, Edible Archetypes is an attempt to trigger a new collaborative understanding: designing through food. The whole project goes beyond aesthetic experimentation—we are drawing a methodological parallelism, combining techniques and procedures belonging to different creative fields. As architects, we recognize that the blurred lines between disciplines like art, music, cinema, politics anthropology and gastronomy creates new fertile grounds for unexpected assemblages. We believe that this approach helps architects design and shape the contents of our contemporary world.

We are using architecture as a methodology to challenge the way patisserie is made, making architectural categories the connecting mechanisms, juxtaposed and applied to raw edible ingredients. Each recipe has its own assembling process, where the morphology of each new dessert is treated as a dome prototype: the result of architectural suggestions, mistakes and trials.

Architects and pastry chefs often use similar tools and elements with the same density and composition, independently adopting similar strategies to address structural problems and material behaviors. In this spirit, the models and drawings for Edible Archetypes were both influenced and responsible for directing the cooking process. And here resides the paradoxical beauty of the project: working in parallel, we learned how to represent a recipe as a design and vice-versa, combining architectural and gastronomic languages in a faceted making process.

Eventually, the project aims to create not only new desserts, but perhaps the machinery and the conceptual tools for them, brought back as ingredients for architectural strategies. Edible Archetypes keeps the two disciplines both autonomous and methodologically connected, determining a fine boundary where one ends and the other starts. And it is exactly there, where we practice architecture. Our favorite “spaces” to produce architecture are indeed the borders between different disciplines (in this case patisserie and architecture itself). We value ambiguity as a positive and productive intellectual tool.

MATERIALITY (MILAN) The traditional Milanese Panettone is combined with the St.Honoré to create an hybrid between the flavours of the Zuccotto and the tactile textures of Italian industrial design products from the ’60s. A basement of naked stracciatella—obtained through a sophisticated horizontal layering of frozen cream and chocolate—could replace the laminate support for a Sottsass animalistic lamp. Here, it sustains a cylinder of yellow crumbs and several rings of spiky almonds. They puncture a pink icing cap, 3D-printed as a 15cm diameter semi-sphere in more than six hours, almost as long as a full size panettone needs to rest after being baked.

SCALE (PARIS) Transparent isomalt spheres—flavoured with Alchermes—are filled with cream, pan di spagna and chocolate ice cream. The entire Zuccotto is thus contained into a platonic shape with a diameter of 2.5cm, reproducing and inverting the scalar process of the Newton Cenotaph, where Étienne-Louis Boullée imagined the whole universe inside a building as an homage to Sir Isaac Newton. The spheres are grouped on top of four dome slices cantilevered from a chocolate stick. Casting and joining elements are the most similar procedures in the two disciplines, with actions choreographed in the same way. However, the artificial powder will never be as expressive as a thin, crunchy sesame vault.

ORNAMENT (ISFAHAN) A double-layer of chocolate crust supports rows of Zoolbias, Baklavas and other typical Iranian fried pastries between its inverted muqarnas, creating a dome, where structure and ornamental envelope become almost indistinguishable. The overall shape recalls a rationalised cluster of grapevine, angur in Iranian, which becomes a geometrical set of three ingredients, playing different roles: the grapes have a neutral taste with a bit of acidity, the insulating nests of fried honey is extremely sweet and the chocolate perforated layer, as a plaster counter-facade, balances the whole compound with its bitterness.

STRUCTURE (ROME) Following the structural system of Hadrian’s Pantheon in Rome, the edible bowl for creamy desserts is treated as an inverted dome, constructed with layered rings of caramelised bricks forming a hole in the centre. They are an hybrid between Florentine biscuits and slices of Roman Pangiallo, oriented radially in the same direction: a yellow, shiny and smooth texture on the exterior contrasts with a crispy conglomerate of nuts pointed towards the interior, reproducing the light and dark effect of a cave. Dried fruit become smashed rubbles of terrazzo tiles, casted into bricks of transparent resin, while the liquid silicon reveals its natural resemblance with the egg yolk density.

FORM (MOSCOW) Highlighting the similarities between jelly pieces and the colourful domes of Saint Basil’s church in Moscow, this cake creates an interplay between what is solid and what is soft, below a deceiving envelope. As in a matryoshka doll, there are different strata—a thin crust of pink icing hides a layer of jelly where, raisin and dry fruit are floating. The baked part of the traditional Kulich is displaced in the middle, as about to come out from the homogenising drape with a vertical pinnacle. This pivotal element organizes a series of colourful plans, thorough result of the horizontal sectioning of the gelatinous volume.

Designed and constructed by

Lemonot

OPEN PLAYFIELD

Exhibition and Performance @Michael Ventris Trust Award

OPEN PLAYFIELD

Inhabitable game

@Michael Ventris Trust Award

London,

2017

“Games offer play with strategy and chance, rules and competition, winning and losing. They reflect the world we live in and reveal hidden and not so hidden aspects of our nature. What does playing games reveal about you? Are you a secret cheater, a stickler for the rules or a gloating winner?” -Game Plan V&A Exhibition

The world we live in is a intricate network of connections. Today everything is connected. Connecting through digital media, connecting our life with virtual reality, with places. What we do as architects but as well as people is to connect fragments. The way we put together our cultural environment, our knowledge, our influences is what makes your own persona. As architects, we are fully immersed in this fragmented reality. The way we create our work and ourselves is through connecting the parts we get in touch with. It is almost impossible to divide the author and his background from the project itself. Indeed, both in the academic and in the professional world, we investigate the way to assemble informations, discussing the conceptual links between different instances and how to adapt them into physical form. The first and foremost stage is the collection of references, the moment you make your own archive to construct your cultural ground. The way you begin selecting your own fragments creates your own device, your body of production.

However, even though you’re always told to find meaningful connections in this vast ocean of informations, the process of selecting the right ingredients is often assigned to intuition, rarely taught, led or controlled. To design is to choose, our job as individuals is to distill the essential components to achieve a collective product. Therefore, why someone would select one thing to be more relevant

The proposal is a small inhabitable playground to “design” the way you select and collect fragments in the architectural creative process, An ironic attempt to “design intuitions” rather than just proposing an intuitive design. Play has been taken up as a core action of cultural production. The space of gaming incorporates a fundamental dichotomy: chance and chaos together with order and hierarchies.

This machine - a wooden inhabitable maze, where you direct a ball into a hole to drop a selected fragment - is a study of modifications, examining what happens when things combine, interact, change place.The physical instability of the play-field is a metaphor of our contemporary realm, where a cross pollination between disciplines, people and objects relentlessly develops. On one hand you introduce a certain amount of objectivity in the process, designing the parameters of the play-field. You can organise the fragments in the pots as in a zoning act, you can dispose the maze - the obstacles for the ball -as if it was an architectural plan. At the same time you enhance the subjectivity, accepting that the selection of your references is led by chaos to a certain extent. You can’t predict where the ball is going to fall. You can design the play-field but you can’t fully control it. You’re constantly challenged by the chance and its mechanisms.

Lemonot

GAME ON!

Play

Pinball machine

@AA Diploma (AA Prize)

GAME ON!

Pinball machine

@AA Diploma (AA Prize)

London,

2016

The project explores different architectural elements and concepts within the form of a pinball machine. The arcade game, uses a steel ball which starts at the top of the machine, following a number of obstacles until it reaches the end of the complex maze. The primary objective of the game is to score as many points as possible.

The pinball machine is the one game that demands a constant and relentless collision between the ball (the protagonist) and the play field. It celebrates randomness over strategy, and endurance over attack. The project argues that "we adopt a game mentality, because play is a core allegory of cultural production". The designer states that "the more you play, the more possibilities you encounter, all the while you hone your skills and develop your agenda, similar to that of an architect."

The construction which took a whole year to be designed and assembled, includes individual 3D parts which are used to form three separate levels. the first level is of the fragments, where you gather what becomes a part of your collection. The second level is the ground, where these pieces begin to form a distributed landscape of ideas. The third level is the bridges, with which you connect these landscapes together into one continuous and contained little world.

Sabrina Morreale

with

Natasha Sandmeier

Manolis Stavrakakis

Video

Sabrina Morreale