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USA

The assumption that all people are able to actualize the rights, benefits, and responsibilities of citizenship within the built environment is misleading. African Americans’ ownership of property and use of public space for personal enjoyment has been historically perceived as transgressive behavior, and often met with punitive legal action, violence, and, at times, death. Given this context, the ability of African Americans to successfully navigate and shape the physical spaces within their lives has amounted to de facto survival strategies. Addressing this fraught social-spatial condition and its impact at the scale of the citizen, Thrival Geographies (In My Mind I See a Line), an intervention in the courtyard of the US Pavilion, is rooted in the historical spatial practices of African Americans, yet speculates upon new spatial strategies that support the most precarious of populations. We foreground these practices as manifestations of civic agency and freedom that move all citizens beyond mere survival toward thrival and full participation in the democratic ideal.

Ukraine

Our short film investigates matters of urban spaces and their perception and critically approaches their potential for the adaptation of new residents. The particular potential of becoming a new or a second home to each individual. How easy is it to achieve this effect, and how can we measure this city's quality? Can the urban landscape define notions of home, and what properties of the city's spatial organization can create a homelike atmosphere? The notion of home is very personal to everyone, it is hard to quantify, but the concept is united by a strong shared sense of values. Home means a friendly place, a comfortable one, accessible and open. Such a perception can contribute to the natural development of both young people and adults. This story is about two friends who recently moved from their native Kyiv to Berlin and Warsaw and faced the need of adaptation to the new context, both cultural and urban. We reflected on the process of interaction with the new urban environment, up to the point where the new city and its architectural landscape started to shape the sense of a home.

Uruguay

Albania

A short film created as a spontaneous action of inclusion of a local taxi driver into the conversation of foreign passengers, three friends. Although we didn’t speak the same language as him, in this short moment in time we let the music he likes become our way of silent communication with him. ‘Marjana therras’ is a personal, poetic view of Tirana, where different simultaneous scenes in a symbolic try to evoke different emotions; scenes of old photographs and bucolic nostalgia, contrasted by estranged people on the streets looking at their phones. While I was staying in Tirana I had a strong feeling of empathy towards older, local people. I saw that often they don’t speak any foreign languages, while at the same time, because of economic challenges Albanian people face they are “forced to” work with tourists. As Tirana is rapidly growing and changing, the city center is full of foreigners, both investors and tourists. Local people don’t take a taxi — they take a bus or they drive a taxi. Local people often don’t go out to eat in restaurants — the eat at home or they work in restaurants. Economic differences between local people and foreigners are felt in all areas of life. In Tirana, I had a strong feeling that local people from Tirana often feel as second-grade citizens in their own city, “occupied” by English-speaking foreigners, surrounded by fancy shops and restaurants, which they, local people — can’t afford. This short film is a documentation of one humble effort of trying to make a local taxi driver feel like he’s at home in his own city, by a simple act of showing an interest in his culture through his own personal — music playlist.

Georgia

Tbilisi has a lot if underground crossing for pedestrians and it's role and only purpose was to help people cross the roads with intensive car traffic. However, with time they have turned into multifunctional public spaces, places where people communicate with each other - shops, beauty salons, ateliers, pharmacies and many more. At the same time, at night, the underground crossing transforms into absolutely different space - dark and dangerous, especially for women. The film explores the underground crosses from all sides of its multifunctional meanings.

Russia

Attention economy is the largest and most disruptive innovation in both the information and in marketing. Smart homes are ubiquitous, connected devices that enable people to monitor, and that which is exploited by a large number of people. Attention economy is, therefore, revealed in the transformation of the public sphere into a panorama of relationships of things, of affects, of intentions. The singular constellation of social relations is the ‘state of Things’. It is also, in a way, a mode of production, which throws light on and gives expression to the intensities of this social process and appears in it a kind of objectivity and a mode of definition so that the political process may more appropriately be regarded as a kind of activity. A space is thus less a specific place or a general archetype of entities, and more a particular constellation of relations and a particular object. A space is thus, one in which, what is stored in the ‘actual’ is also what can be transformed into a modulating effect of that, and the inclusivity of the non-human perspective, be it nature or machine.