Special issue
Edited by Victor Brunfaut, Quentin Nicolaï, Sara Tassi
On May 7-8th, 2018, the closing colloquium of a research project questioning the notion of public space in South Benin was held at ULB's School of Architecture La Cambre Horta. This gathering extended a reflexive work dealing with the architectural tools developed during study days organised in September 2017 in Porto-Novo, Benin. The outcomes of these two events constitute the body of the current issue.
During the events, the notion of situation emerged as a crucial one. This notion draws attention to situated ways through which realities are established by the perspectives they bring together: they exist only through them. These ways helps us considering realities beyond binary oppositions such as object/subject, figure/ground, inside/outside, mind/matter, etc. and leads us to think and act in terms of connections, of interdependencies.
This special issue of the journal CLARA Architecture/Recherche therefore contains a report on the Brussels colloquium, including the four 'situations' presented there: "Living in migration: Brussels and the Rif" (Lisa Raport) and "Territories of the dead" in Brussels (Graziella Vella), "La Baraque, an inhabited landscape" in Louvain-la-Neuve (Gaspard Geerts) and "Le Samaritain, the shantytown who strove to become a village" in northern Paris (Saskia Cousin). This report is completed, at the end of the issue, by the one related to the Porto-Novo study days held on the Place de la Radio, Radioxọkọn, which will help to situate the origin of our questioning.
The problem of "how to report" is central to this issue. Indeed, it engages a constant attention to what is extended or not, and to experiment with the devices of description. The trajectories unfolding through this publication are constituted by a multitude of gestures of resumption: resumptions that matter, in every sense of the word.Published: 2019-09-01
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