Welcome to a K3 seminar with design duo Brave New Alps (Bianca Elzenbaumer and Fabio Franz). It will be held on Monday, March 20, 14.15-16.00, in The Open Studio on the fifth floor of Niagara (Room NIC 0541).

The title of the talk is: Building QuerciaLAB – Towards a Community Economies Research and Resource Centre.

Here is an abstract for the talk:

What does it mean to live and work in common in today’s world ridden by socio-economic as well as environmental crises? To grapple with this pressing question in our everyday life, in September 2016 we began to build QuerciaLAB, a community economies research and resource centre as a space where to experiment with non-hegemonic socio-economic relations.

The still ongoing building process unfolds in collaboration with others currently inhabiting the Vallagarina valley in the Italian Alps as well as with people in our international network of practitioners. As the Centre starts out, it is hosted in a disused industrial space (200m²), which is part of a complex of buildings that have been re-functioned in 2015 in order to host up to 80 asylum seekers.

 During this seminar, we want to share our experiences so far and open up a space for constructive debate about what role socially engaged designers can play in creating situations where to enact a prefigurative politics of life in common.