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AMAL.GAM II

he second instalment of Amal.Gam - Amal.Gam (2) FEST situates itself within the realm of festivals, feasts and carnivals and will continue to redefine the required physical space of gestures, behaviours and rituals. Popular-festive forms have the power to create a space of multiplicity, a second unofficial world able to shake up the authoritarian version of language and values. Feasts and more specifically carnivals nowadays represent an exploration in subversion, laughter, ambivalence, becoming and excess, which pushes aside the seriousness and hierarchies of “official” life. The outrageous and contradictory images that make up carnivals and festivals inherit an ambivalence allowing a profound reflection on society. Within this frame architecture doesn’t develop individually but is inherited within the psyche of the ritual, evoking a potential language of the mind adjacent to a collective unconscious, a “Category of Imagination”.

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The semester is structured in two phases, biotope / anthropological studies and material studies. The main goal of the first phase is the development of an architectural and ritual storyboard representation based on environmental analysis and anthropological studies. Each student will be studying a given festival ( Giant Kites of Sagami Festival, Burningman, the Mask festival in Burkina Faso,..) trying to indicate main spatial elements and their relationship within a social context. This analysis must be meaningful and operative and will be used to identify a design intervention within the hypothetical framework. The main goal of the second phase is the experimentation of new design and fabrication approaches through a material driven logic. Through a series of workshops students will learn how to incorporate fiction, representation and material studies to explore, experiment and create new and imaginative ways of producing architecture. Students will conceptualize, design and construct a new notion of ritual-space re-associating the notion of context with festivals and carnival imaginary.