Stupid Togetherness

Stupid Togetherness is an experimental and collaborative project consisting of six Master’s Students from Bauhaus-Universität Weimar and Université Lumière Lyon 2 formed within the Erasmus+ project SHAKIN’.
The project Stupid Togetherness seeks to question existing spatial mechanisms and explore the possibilities for collaborative engagement within the urban spaces. Inspired by theories and artistic approaches such as urban studies, affect, and urban hacking, the approach of stupid togetherness was developed. During the Winter School, the group invited participants to a workshop exploring an embodied experience of space, where spatial power hierarchies are subverted in unexpected ways. The experiences were collected in the end and worked into a manifestos.

The project idea anchored the topic of subaltern knowledge to space. In Stupid Togetherness, we draw upon the relational nature of space and recognize the exclusionary nature of sociоspatial production. By developing our project, we engaged in many discussions about the accessibility of space for different “user groups” and patterns of exclusion based on gender, class, and race. As a result, we came to the concept, which is performative and absurdist, which allows amplifying of different voices, those which can be considered subaltern ones, by a more emotional and playful connection with urban space.
International and interdisciplinary, our group consists of students of architecture, cultural management, media studies, and urban studies from four different countries. The members share a common, yet multifaceted interest in the various struggles and negotiations within the city space and territory.

As our framing and research question begin with the processes that create hierarchies of exclusion in a European context, the idea of our project is inherently a very subaltern one. Our claim is that because there exists a hierarchical structure in public space, it follows that many of its users or inhabitants can be considered subalterns.
To explain our understanding of these hierarchies, we define space as produced through knowledge created by dominant economic, social, and political groups. Other voices remain marginalized in the official channels of spatial production. Our workshop invited participants to challenge this hierarchy-creation and exclusion mechanism and instead re-imagine it through manifestos. Normally a tool of declaration used by architects, social thinkers, and urban planners, manifestos are rarely created by diverse groups of citizens. Appropriating this academic and exclusive tool, we wanted to subvert the dominant ways of spatial production by giving a voice to everyone.

Link to material #1 - Manifestos on and for public space (Part 1/3)
These manifestos were created by a group of students involved in the Shakin project after a workshop exploring an embodied experience of space, where spatial power hierarchies are subverted in unexpected ways.

Link to material #2 - (Part 2/3)

Link to material #3 - (Part 3/3)

Location	De-centralized project held in Belgrade, Serbia, Weimar, Germany and Lyon, France Experimentation held in Lyon, France
Original language(s)	English
Existing translations
Length	Fall 2021-Summer 2022
Project runtime	2021 - 2022
Institution of affiliation	Bauhaus Universität Weimar Université Lumière Lyon 2
Sponsor(s)	Sharing subaltern knowledge through international cultural collaborations (SHAKIN') EU’s Erasmus+ program

Name of contributor: Silja Komulainen, Lilo Nöske, Marion Renard, Pascaline Robinot, Agca Saglam, Galyna Sukhomud