A solid surface to stand on? Ground can also be a place to hide, a place to jump from, or to go through if it's muddy enough. In the same spirit, we now invite readers to share the virtual space of thought that this book opens. It serves as both an archive and a prompt, encouraging us to navigate the unknown and imagine new ways of collectively inhabiting and reshaping the public realm.
What moves between the walls of our public buildings? Who is that that truly inhabits these spaces? And what roles do we play within them? What if we are both the building blocks and the inhabitants, the creators and the created? What if we write the script as we go along?
This book is the second of a two-volume publication series, following Script For a Synthetic Play: On (un)grounding community and the generative power of fiction, published in 2021. It stems from the performative symposium, Unknown Grounds: The Public Building which brought together artists and thinkers to immerse in speculative scenarios.
By borrowing tools from the performance arts, we explored embodied collective thinking around the notion of "the public building." We became characters in an experimental play, exploring new ways to relate and engage. In the shelter of fiction, we were free from social habits, empowered to see ourselves not just as passive occupants, but as active architects, speculators, constructors, foundation inspectors, janitors and maintenance workers.
Script for a Synthetic Play: The Public Building features texts by Hamja Ahsan, Lila Athanasiadou, Nina Glockner, Ribal al-Khatib, Anna Moreno, Flora Reznik, Nishant Shah, and Eef Veldkamp.
