Urban space for opportunities and cultural contamination
A Rural Boxx project, featuring Ctrl+Z, D1618, lamatraKa
agRorà is a socio-cultural laboratory born through the synergic combination of a physical structure with a cultural program. It mainly aims at opening spaces and offering opportunities to those socio-cultural activities already existing on the territory and which could benefit of educational, promotional and development facilities.
The infrastructure is therefore an instrument of agglutination and unification of these activities. It allows them to develop easily, to increase their impact potential and to expand themselves. It is a common area promoting contemporarily the contact, the synergy, the collaboration and the cultural contamination among different groups aiming at the creation of networks and joint projects.
Within the present economic and social context, to which it corresponds also a specific architectural movement, it seems that the idea of an area reflecting only its own physicality could not be exhaustive anymore. We are perceiving therefore the need of extending the experimentation horizontally towards a social and cultural dimension, of opening it to other professions and to a participative and co-responsible citizenship. An informal community filling of life breath the physical place and endowing it with a continuity transcending the spatial ad time horizons of this initiative.
We are certain about the importance of establishing a synchrony between the physical spaces and the programs hosted within. For this reason it emerges clearly the necessity of guaranteeing the distribution of the available resources, parallel between both the spheres, since they only can be conceived in total symbiosis.
agRorà proposes itself therefore as a cultural place (apolitical, nonreligious, and noncommercial) where the programmed activities, sometimes, give the floor to those activities emerging from the participatory process and from the visibility opportunities which the citizenship is invited to freely benefit of.
agRorà physical spaces will host activities, movements and proposals, even extremely different ones from the others. Sometimes they could seem dissonant, but the vocation of this initiative is exactly that of transforming each activity into an opportunity of contact, collaboration and contamination. The creation of spaces where different realities – that probably couldn’t have found a different place for dialogue and contact – are able to coexist and the establishment of contacts among them shall represent the major achievement of this proposal.
An urban laboratory aims at acquiring a role of intermediation for the cohabitation not only of the most variegated cultural expressions, but also of those citizens belonging to different socio-economical ranges and coming from distant urban areas for the creation of some unusual, bizarre and spontaneous associations able to generate difficultly predictable results.
It is a program involving children and housewives, with a special focus on young people and adolescents, aiming at the creation of a place where all activities are thought for stimulating a dialogue which, within the contemporary society, is perceived as slowly being interrupted.
The idea standing at the basis of the agRorà concept is that of keeping the patio of the MAXXI a place where two different realities meet and coexist, look one at the other, touch each other: the area of the museum, with its atmosphere of homogeneous suspension and the city, so real, heterogeneous, chaotic, living and continuously transforming itself.
The initiative departed from the invitation that Rural Boxx (Architecture) extended to Ctrl+Z (Architecture-Rome/Seville), D1618 (Architecture–Budapest) and lamatraKa (Sociocultural mangers–Seville) for the creation of a multidisciplinary group pooled by a great enthusiasm and bearing the experience of past joint projects developed in different parts of the world.
agRorà is a finalist project in the YAP MAXXI 2012 competition – Young Architects Program – by MAXXI Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo
MAXXI, Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, Roma, 16 giu > 23 set 2012
MoMA PS1, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1 lug > 8 set 2012
Images: Rural Boxx + Ctrl+Z + D1618 + lamatraKa, agRorà, YAP MAXXI 2012, Courtesy Fondazione MAXXI
visit the exhibition at MAXXI link
visit the exhibition at MoMA PS1 link
read the article at Domus link