How to work with ruins? Urban Ecology as the intervention tool
Workshop with Robert Ungar
Onya Collective, "Grow. Build. Do It Yourself". Garden installation and video guides to urban micro-ecologies, Musraramix Art Festival 2015, Jerusalem, Israel
The dichotomy between the city and nature is rooted deep. Wild ecological systems, controlled by laws of nature poses an entirely separate set of rules than the planned, cultured, human created city.
However the city has its own ecological system, and within it evolve new natural laws. This system has waste that bothers us, but can be treated in a circular manner ad serve us as a resource.
Then there is the human resource. Energy and interest, talent and wisdom, waiting to be explored and put to work. People love to know. They want to influence. They are at best when they do. This is where community and ecology meet, where public space and grassroots movements grow.
In this workshop we will scan the city for its available resources and think in collaboration with random street users, our future clients, ways to harness this unused potential for the public good.
Robert Ungar - architect, artist, activist, designer, manager, teacher, farmer, all of the above and none of them at all. He is the driving force behind the founding of Onya collective and the initiator of Next Station project.
ONYA Collective, bringing together designers, architects and activists are active in Tel-Aviv's half abandoned central bus station. The group initiated the "Next Station" project, as part of "Worldwide Storefront" international exhibition by Storefront for Art and Architecture gallery.
"Next Station" included over 30 cultural and agricultural interventions by architects, farmers, agricultural companies, artists and poets, who offered conceptual or demonstrative agri-puncture spatial actions throughout public paths within the colossal brutalist Central Bus Station of Tel-Aviv. Through human scale place making and community-oriented interventions, the group opens alternative channels of thought regarding the future of abandoned public spaces with using upcycled resources and natural elements. Today, many interventions live on, while the collective continues to work through community work and cultural events.