Temporality

… is a lens through which Urban Practice views the world. Urban Practice knows how to settle somewhere “for the time being”; it uses a gap, finds a niche, and invites “pioneering uses” that could even morph into a veritable “adaptive reuse of reality.”
For a moment, for a while—but not “for always”—it routinely and repeatedly finds in them allies, as it were, that are the expression of a freedom which enables it to truly improvise, allowing a creativity to unfold that poses its own questions and develops its own proposals.
Michel de Certeau, in his 1980 book L’Invention du Quotidien (The Practice of Everyday Life), calls such procedures “multiform, resistant, tricky and stubborn,” explaining they “elude discipline without being outside of the field in which it is exercised.” Under the heading “From the concept of the city to urban practices,” he continues: “Finally, the functionalist organization, by privileging progress (i. e., time), causes the condition of its own possibility—space itself—to be forgotten; space thus becomes the blind spot in a scientific and political technology.”
These “spatial practices,” which “in fact secretly structure the determinant conditions of social life,” are what we are interested in and a “material” of Urban Practice that, in order to work with it, not only requires a special “toolbox” but sometimes also “complicity” with administrative bodies, property owners, and politics.
Urban Practice needs “stamina,” because the city never sleeps. We have to (collectively) create a “break” by ourselves.

ftts / Todosch Schlopsnies: Since 2015, architect and graphic designer Federica Teti and sculptor and performer Todosch Schlopsnies have been taking a participatory approach in their work with children, teens, and adults (from refugee and non-refugee backgrounds). In workshops of varied format, the course participants build, garden, invent, and play. The main focus, besides creating the direct experience of cultural participation across all boundaries of origin and language, is to achieve something together that would never have been possible alone, and to also have lots of fun while doing it. Artistic direction of the pilot project Stadtwerk mrzn (S27) since 2020.