The Lacaton & Vassal Pritzker Prizes and RCR Arquitectes participate in the 2024 Open Program conference cycle

Once again, the College of Architects of Catalonia, through the Garrotxa-Ripollès Delegation, is co-organizing the cycle of RCR Open Program conferences that will take place in the courtyard of the Olot Hospice, from 2 to 1 July 11, 2024. These conferences accompany the RCR International Workshop of Architecture and Landscape and Photography, promoted by the studio RCR Arquitectes and the RCR Bunka Foundation, which will take place in the capital of Garrotxina from the 1st to the 15th of July

In this edition, the RCR Open Program has as its backbone the theme of sharing. Sharing is a concept related to values such as generosity, solidarity, empathy and respect. It involves breaking with selfishness and recognizing the value of others. It is a way of living and relating to others, based on giving and receiving as a way of enriching oneself and contributing to the common good.

The first of the 5 conferences will be given by the photographers María Bleda and José María Rosa , National Photography Award 2008, who will inaugurate, on July 2, the program of this edition. Under the title Bleda and Rosa. Common Places , they will discover the existing link between image, place and memory that they have explored together. They have always understood the territory as a common good, depository of individual and collective memory. Through their photographs, they try to bring out the different layers accumulated over time and thus highlight the complex intersection of cultures and times that make up the places we live.

The second conference, on July 4, will be given by the Balearic architect Carles Oliver Barceló , member of the Balearic Housing Institute (IBAVI), where he led the climate change adaptation project 'Life Reusing Posidonia ' in Formentera, which received the LIFE 2021 award for the best environmental project by the European Commission. On this occasion he will talk to us about The collective search for a new productive model , based on the idea that reversing climate change and its derived effects requires a change in production and consumption models in all areas. And this effort must necessarily be collective. The presentation of this conference will be carried out by Jordi Moret i Vayreda, delegate of the Garrotxa-Ripollès of the COAC.

On July 9 it will be the turn of Lacol , the cooperative of architects that works to generate community infrastructures for the sustainability of life, as a key tool for the ecosocial transition, through architecture, cooperativism and participation. With Rethinking the quotidian they consider the quotidian as the place of the common, the daily and the ordinary. In a context of systemic crisis - social, environmental and economic - the transformative potential of everyday practices is the starting point for imagining other ways of organizing and relating, of building and inhabiting architecture. The presentation of this conference will be carried out by Guillem Costa Calsamiglia, dean of the COAC.

Under the umbrella of the European project S+T+ARTS AIR: Artistic Innovation for European Resilience, a dialogue conference will take place on July 10 by the multimedia artist in residence Michail Rybakov with the researcher specialized in computational physics and complex systems Hygor Melo , from Sony Computer Science Laboratories in Rome (Sony CSL). Entitled The Body and the City , they will address the concept of personal space and explore how the cities we live in influence our daily experience of personal space.

On this occasion, Olot will bring together another Pritzker Prize: the French architecture studio Lacaton & Vassal (Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal), who will talk to us about free space. For them, architecture is freedom, generosity and pleasure. Large spaces generate an essential sense of escape and freedom, facilitate ownership and promote social life. His practice has been awarded the Pritzker Prize 2021. The presentation of this conference will be in charge of Llàtzer Moix, cultural journalist and architecture critic.

Cycle of video creations Subject Forest

Materia Bosc is a cycle of video creations that dialogues, in parallel, with the cycle of RCR Open Program conferences. Based on the intimate link that RCR Arquitectes' work has with trees as a raw material for the construction of living spaces, the collaboration of LABEA - Laboratorio de arte, ciencia y naturaleza - begins in 2019 with the RCR Bunka Foundation. Its 6th edition is a selection curated by Isabel Ferreira that celebrates the poetic force of trees in five works of video dance, video performance and short video art based on values such as care, protection, fertility, simplicity, vitality, attention and interdependence.

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