Bodies of water.
➔ Bauhaus of the Seas
According to the United Nations, 40% of the world’s population lives within 100 kilometers of the coast. In the EU, data from 2011 showed 40.8% of the population was living in coastal regions, which covered 40% of EU-27 territory. That's no small sum.
Portugal being a country with half of its borders made by the sea, it’s no wonder it gave birth to a manifesto advocating a Bauhaus of the Seas.
The idea sailed from Lisbon, and in 2022 a consortium was born with 18 institutions from different coastal cities around Europe — either next to the sea or to other bodies of water. Their project is called the Bauhaus of the Seas Sails (BoSS) and it’s funded under one of the European Commission’s New European Bauhaus calls.
“Our purpose is to understand how, through design, art and architecture, we can reimagine life on the edge of the water”, Frederico Duarte tells us.
Who's the BoSS?
What’s so particular about this project is that it joins institutions from academia, municipalities and cultural projects, from cities located in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal and Sweden.
“But culture is the driving force of the project”, as Mariana Pestana, Arts and Culture Coordinator at BoSS, hurries to explain.
That becomes obvious by going through some of the amazing institutions which are part of the consortium. For example, TBA21, the international foundation Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary, dedicated to studying and commissioning art related to the seas and the water. Or the Nieuwe Institute, in Rotterdam, developing a very interesting project called Zoöp, which presents a model for more-than-human assemblies for decision making, to establish cooperation between human and nonhuman life and safeguard the interests of all. Or extended partners like Atelier Luma, based in Arles (France), a circular-design and biomaterials laboratory which has been discovering the most incredible qualities of algae for all sorts of artistic and utilitarian uses.
What can we learn from these institutions? Mariana answers: “we tried to include cultural institutions which have worked extensively on ideas connecting humans and bodies of water, under controlled cultural contexts. By creating this network, we hope we can extend their expertise beyond their cultural realms and generate new developments which will have a positive impact on people’s everyday life and their cities.
We also hope they will help us open our imagination towards what’s possible when cities relate to rivers, lagoons or the ocean”.
Universities linked in to the project include Instituto Superior Técnico (Lisbon), Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Genova), Università Ca’Foscari Venezia, Università Iuav di Venezia, TU Delft and Malmö University.
A lighthouse demonstrator
So far, the BoSS is the only project under this EU funding stream (called the Lighthouse Demonstrators) to be lead from Portugal. Actually, from any Southern European Country.
Frederico’s role as Communication Coordinator of BoSS has led him to find different ways to explain exactly what it is that they’re doing. “We already know in the next three years, we’ll develop a number of pilot projects, ranging from food to makers' spaces dedicated to materials of the sea. These pilots take the form of physical objects and places. But they don’t know everything yet!”
The nature of BoSS is highly exploratory and experimental, and that’s why the EC called these funded projects the Lighthouse Demonstrators.
Something that starts as a research project at one of the universities, can soon become an art work or the pretext for an artistic residency, and later be presented or adopted in one of the partnering municipalities.
As Frederico explains further: “for example, one of the projects under research is to work on a regenerative menu. But we don’t know yet how this will be applied to our everyday’s life. Artists may decide to bring it to the museum, but not necessarily to an exhibition room. It can be consumed at the cafeteria. It’s really about challenging the ways in which we are used to dealing with the results of research projects. They can become artworks, policy papers, mobility schemes, open data exercises — there are many possible outcomes.”
Bottom line, BoSS wants to act as a catalyst to processes, people and communities who are doing interesting work. By mapping and engaging people, from researchers to curators, activists to policy makers, it’s all about finding how we can learn from each other.
From Beato to the World
All of these institutions from around Europe got together last February at Factory Lisbon for the kick off of BoSS, mostly because this is where the Portuguese partners, which are the consortium leaders, are based.
Mariana tells us how the municipality of Lisbon identified Beato as one of the city areas that could be an interesting playground for BoSS.
It also made sense because Nuno Jardim Nunes, the director of the Interactive Technologies Institute, recently decided to move his research center to Factory — and that's where Marian and Frederico work. Also, the BoSS already has a special relationship with Praça, another very active player inside Hub Criativo do Beatowith whom they hope to develop a regenerative menu.
“Beato has proven to be a good starting point to collaborate with others because it’s in itself an ecosystem in which we want to grow, namely through the Blue Makerspace, which is one of the outcomes of BoSS in Lisbon and to which local communities are expected to have access to. But we are also looking into how we can contaminate other areas of town”, Mariana explains.
For now, the team has identified green spaces and squares around Beato that might be shaped with ideas, materials and designs developed within the BoSS framework.
They are also building the Sea Forum, a group of locally based citizens, experts or merely interested in the topics covered by the BoSS, who will shape the project.
That’s why they believe it’s so important not to know from day one everything they will do. Inclusiveness is one of the values BoSS seems to be more serious about and involving the locals is key to understanding how they can act upon these communities.
The post industrial look and feel of Beato seems to have captured Frederico’s curiosity.
Understanding that some people live closer to the river and to HCB, and other communities live beyond the train lines, in Marvila and Chelas, Frederico believes “there’s a social risk here, of this transformation only impacting the people who live closer. I’m personally very interested in understanding the people who live beyond the train lines and how the reimagining of this old part of Lisbon can include both communities.”
