Thematic awareness, collaborative experience, and an understanding of an expanded field of action are shared at the International Summer Seminar. The " temporary displacement” of architecture students from diverse contexts, to Fundão, aims at the horizontal sharing of knowledge, through "direct experience" and the opportunity to establish new dialogues.
Fundão is part of the list of eight Portuguese cities included in the European Union Mission for Adaptation to Climate Change. The municipality is a territory that is deeply affected by water scarcity and highly intensive agriculture, fires and desertification, and simultaneously, is representative of investments in social inclusion and expanding technological developments in the inland region.
With tutoring from the Design Teams and the participation of national and international students, selected by open call and reinforced by institutional partnerships, the intervention materialises in the self-construction of installations scattered throughout the territory, developing strategies for the capture, fixation, use and/or redistribution of water in the municipality of Fundão.
The International Summer Seminar aims to
raise awareness in future generations of alternative ways of doing architecture, favouring the
cornerstones and the
hopeful future of the project
Fertile Futures, beyond the period of the exhibition.
Addressing common and intersecting issues, Fertile Futures defends that a laboratory cannot present known results at the outset and, therefore, collaborating with other disciplinary areas, it promotes the production of speculative investigations, presented in word and drawing form, for an exhibition that thinks about a fertile, sustainable and equitable future, to be presented at the 18th International Exhibition of Architecture – La Biennale di Venezia 2023. In summary, Fertile Futures reiterates the transformative capacity of an architectural exhibition, as a knowledge production platform.