Valga Architecture Residency invites researchers, architects and crafty creators to apply for our summer group residency "Material Purgatory: Life after demolition". The residency focuses on finding new opportunities for retired materials that have been forgotten in the purgatory of the shed for decades.
VARES summer residency focuses on materials that have been left in the back of the garden, forgotten in the urban environment or already abandoned in the local dump. Roof tiles, floorboards, old windows, demolished office furniture, piles of fabric strips, bathroom tiles or dodgy composite materials that have been gathering dust in the shed, attic or basement, waiting for its fate to be decided: either to be used or thrown out. Material piles, where there is not enough stuff for starting a new project, but enough to not be thrown out.
For the residency we are searching for proposals that ask questions how bits of materials can be (re)used; how and what kind materials should be collected and store; how to adapt existing systems of construction, that would favor the use of local, already existing materials; how to influence aesthetic choices, that would promote used materials over virgin materials; who to lessen material greed and overconsumption in the building industry?
