CO-CARTS

CO-CARTS

Residency program Lungomare 2020 Bolzano

An unusual convoy wanders through the city: it crosses the neighborhoods from the historic center to the large public housing complexes, it enters the courtyards bordered by vegetable gardens and dotted with spaces tamed by an excess of prohibitions; it reaches the river, skirts it, descends along the sports fields, and climbs up the sides of the mountains. Suddenly the amazing parade dissolves, the vehicles split up and draw new trajectories in the urban territories. They choose small interstices or large voids in which to stop. Finally, they gather again. They occupy space, make themselves comfortable, stretch their limbs, open their wings like birds ready for take-off, pull out of their laps unexpected objects. And they join to form new ways of inhabiting space.

Little by little a collection of eccentric, polymorphous machines shows up: the CO-CARTS. Provisional, extroverted, disruptive. Noisy and subversive. Low-tech devices, multifunctional tools in antithesis to the singularity and individualism of cars. Each with its own form and a use that distinguishes it, but it is together that they best express their potential. Singular silhouettes, they march claiming collectivity. CO-CARTS are mobile public spaces, wandering alter egos of many associations working daily in the city and for the city, building ties, opening up spaces of expression and giving voice to diversity. They are constantly looking for new collaborations, proposing open systems of management and sharing. CO-CARTS are pop-up devices, built to be manipulated and transformed, engaging in synergy with each other and with the context and amplifying the relationship between the inhabitants and the city. They collect hidden resources, activate dormant synapses of a collective intelligence ready to emerge. CO-CARTS look for alternatives, suggest possibilities, open trajectories, invite to imagine new social pacts and unusual ways to inhabit the city.

CO-CARTS is a project born during Lungomare’s long-term residency in Bolzano and which participates in the research strand on relational mobile devices, winking at the Co-Machines (ON-OFF).

Lungomare is a cultural institution promoting transdisciplinary and experimental projects that interact with the cultural and socio-political processes of the territory of South Tyrol.

Lungomare for 2020 residency invites orizzontale to focus on the city of Bolzano public space, reflecting on how to get out of the temporary state of pause amplified by the Covid19 pandemic and the additional rules of social control that have affected its access and interaction. Thus, on how to reclaim it. The residency has been divided in three phases: the public acts, the collective construction, and the celebration.

During the three phases active inhabitants, professionals and associations of Bolzano have participated in this progressive return to exercise the right to the outdoor space and to regain the suspended sociality.

Co-Carts are vehicles for the community. They can be attached to a bicycle, and their shape and function have the potential to change urban space. The installation of a megaphone amplifies protesting voices, giving important messages their necessary acoustic strength; Temporary exhibitions can be held on the vehicles, they are equipped with a table that invites you to do things together, a cinema screen for projections and flaps and doors that create a temporary space for action.

Co-Carts will be able to be rented and used by Bolzano citizens. To borrow them it will be necessary to share some basic values defined jointly by Lungomare, orizzontale and the other partners involved.

Co-Carts are eccentric, open, and anti-racist. They do not produce personal profit. They support inclusiveness, deconstructing existing categories, not only creating a space but celebrating it. Co-Carts promote freedom of opinion, are multilingual, cross-cultural, and trigger discussion, debate, reactions. The Co-Carts are slow but agile, both quiet and noisy. They don’t disturb traffic but they do alter it, and with absolute certainty, they don’t emit exhaust gases! They are vehicles that open up new possibilities and stimulate the imagination.