BeAr
(Spain)Defining yourself is enunciating your resignations, making your disabilities visible.
>in a city neither big nor beautiful
>neither specialized, nor specialists
>neither tradition, nor truth
>neither modern, nor nostalgic
>neither global, nor globalized
>neither local, nor capitalist
>neither natural, nor folkloric
>always in fiction
>always from below
>always political
>beauty
BEAR is an architecture office based in Bilbao that explores the possibilities of architecture as a discursive practice. Directed by Ane Arce and Iñigo Berasategui, BEAR resumes its activity in 2021 after operating since 2018 as AZAB. Their works have received important recognitions and publications in specialized national and international media (Arquine, Plot, AV). It is worth noting the Peña Ganchegui 2019 award for the best Young Basque Architects, the Egurtek 2020 Award or various recognitions in Arquia Próxima and BEAU.
Elements of Dissidence
Becoming Attuned
Elements of Dissidence is an open space for objectual design that, from the production of the concrete, seeks to leap into new aesthetics able to question our perception of the present.
In 2014, Rem Koolhaas, as curator of the Venice Biennale, explored architectural elements as basic units whose comprehension, use, and aestheticization over-determine the architectural act. Extracting elements from their environment and understanding them as essential functional units is, at the same time, a political act: from the object towards the narrative.
Cities are dotted with these elemental units —furniture, symbols, pavements, signage, souvenirs— that structure everyday life. Dissidence emerges in the conscious and critical act of not taking anything for granted, of questioning the imposed and redirecting our gaze towards new horizons.
Reinventing realities through repetition or dislocation allows us to disobey established patterns and generate new scenarios. Direct action on ordinary objects opens the possibility of re-signifying them with unexpected uses.
Aligned with the line of Becoming Attuned, this workshop invites participants to work from the small and the tangible, fine-tuning sensitivity towards the ordinary and the accidental, in order to uncover new poetics capable of transforming architectural practice.
