einaidea [the research and cultural programming platform founded by Fundació Eina in 2019 with the aim of altering normalized practices in art and design],
presents
PERI\FERAL is an intensive post-urban studies program aimed at all those who wish to deepen their understanding of the city’s margins through strategies that connect art, architecture and speculative thought. Organized by einaidea in collaboration with Eina, Centre Universitari de Disseny i Art de Barcelona, the program unfolds over seven weeks and concludes with a postgraduate diploma equivalent to 24 university credits. PERI\FERAL focuses on post-urban scenarios of contemporary life—particularly on the artistic and conceptual potential of the city’s liminal zones—taking the outskirts of Barcelona as a case study and testing ground. The fringes, as vectors of contemporary urbanity, are environments traversed by mobility and the anomalous: informal ecosystems where pollution and self-construction overlap with the infrastructural landscape, the housing shortage, and remnants of pre-urban nature. The city grows tentacularly—its center is far away, and the suburban tells us less about its limits than about its subconscious dimension: wastelands, warehouses, storage rooms, small nature reserves, residential sprouts, unknown monuments, ring roads, rewilded dumps… A portrait of the European city through its hinterlands. The diversity and ambiguity of these spaces makes them peri-feral. What is peri-feral confers a wildened or untamed dimension to the poorly surveilled spaces of the outskirts, fostering study exercises with architects, artists, designers, and ecologists. The sequence of workshops will follow the structure of a trans-disciplinary or, better, peri-disciplinary postgraduate diploma.
Faculty
David Bestué
Manuel Cirauqui
Jordi Colomer
Patricia Dauder
Forty Five Degrees
Lara García Díaz
María García Ruiz
Sunny Graves
Mathias Klenner
Caterina Miralles
& Mireia Molina Costa
Joan Rieradevall Pons
José Luis Uribe
+ to be announced
PERI\FERAL will propose dynamics of research and interaction with the peri-urban landscape and its strata, with the aim of opening and redefining the present and future practice of each participant. As a program of einaidea that challenges the boundaries of both the academic field and creative disciplines, PERI\FERAL articulates an urgent need for the redistribution of knowledge and agency and mobilizes poetic-political blocks of possibilities within a situated framework. With each of the invited practices, PERI\FERAL will explore multiple formats that will assemble, overlap and resonate throughout the seven weeks.
Four conceptual blocks or lines of study define the direction of PERI\FERAL:
Substructure: centered around the primary functions of the periphery as a support and as machinery of urban centers and residential areas; the suburban as a backdrop of the tertiary world and an ecosystem managed more by workers than populated by citizens.
Auscultate the outside: a block of activities that activate the typically inert, empty, or vacant elements of the periphery, particularly in interstitial and ambiguous zones, be they woodlands or warehouse surroundings.
Feral contracts: a constant exercise in interspecies diplomacy, sometimes through tectonic devices (burrows, dikes, huts, hives) with the aim of opening or healing channels of relationship between diverse bodies that transit the outskirts.
Impure ecology: study of the spurious life forms that emerge and consolidate in the often battered biomes of the peri-urban: wastelands, legal or illegal dumps, streams, groves, industrial estates.