© Science of Singularities

Altereurope materialises in libraries, museums, universities, or in public space, setting up spaces of collective reflection, creation and discussion. 

The project proposes to embark on a journey across a continent to be imagined, to be shaped through the collective engagement of each one’s speculative and creative faculties.

The original core of the collective processes is represented by three collections of text excerpts driven from the personal libraries of the project initiators, and reflecting about Boundaries, Societies, and Languages through a theoretical shift in the perspective of looking at Europe. The quest for an originary, identitarian principle is replaced with the acknowledgment of the alterities constituting Europe.  

What if we tried to think about Europe, to narrate and visualise it as a space in which a plurality of threads meet and weave the fabric of its history?

In a second step the text-based collections were supplemented by visual sources. The visual elements challenge the preconceived  narratives and interfere in the development of the discourse. 

In each episode of the project, Altereurope collections are expanded, and related to new thematic elements that considers the specificity of the host context. They are then collectively processed to result in a new imaginative arrangement of the source material.

Previous editions of Altereurope have explored issues of global citizenship (Winter 2023) and, under the title Entangled Matters, European society, its borders and its language from the perspective of the ecosystems that make it up (Summer 2023).   

 

© Giovanni Ambrosio. Entangled Matters, Fulda 2023

Formats

Imagination Labs

From 3 hours to 3 day interventions:

Imagination Labs involve a specific group of participants in a one-off experiment in democratic imagination that can last from 3 hours to 3 days. In order to “alter” their perspectives on Europe participants experiment with different creative and discursive practices and jointly elaborate different kinds of sources questioning accustomed ways of seeing and thinking. 

Future Manufactory

7- 10 days Participatory work-in-progress Exhibition:

The Future’s Manufactory is an imaginative production plant. It does not produce goods, it produces visions for the future.  It is composed of different installations, tools and working stations,  such as the Table of Matters (link), the Foundland Map (link), the Visual Working Station and the Handwork Station. Here we invite different and heterogeneous groups of participants (local students, school classes, members of associations and other residents) and individual visitors to create step by step, evolutive and collaborative, the Cartography of another possible Europe. Through the interplay of different layers of visual, poetical and discursive interventions, the wave of an unseen landscape takes shape under our eyes through the collaborative intervention of the participants.