“WHATIFS AND WHYNOTS”: OFF-Playground”
The other OFF project takes place in the boathouse AHOI! on the banks of the Fulda river. Since Gaudiopolis in 2017, playing games, community building and free creation have been omnipresent in OFF’s activities, and so on the banks of the Fulda, we create a ‘construction site’ that has the potential of a playground while questioning its normative nature and its expectations of ‘how to play’. In a world of ‘whatifs’ and ‘whynots’, simple functional objects can become toys with the help of imagination, and a construction site can turn into aplayground. Collaborative creation that sometimes transcends – in fact, creates – reality and the translation of dreams into experience: these are the building blocks of this playground, which we build together with artists, architects, gardeners and children – as well as visitors. The buildings and installations created here are largely made from simple or recycled materials, mobilising the boundlessness of imagination, of the world of children, the liberating power of stories and fairy tales, in order to find a free world beyond the playground fence.
Artists: AUW (Architecture Uncomfortable Workshop) / Dénes Emil GHYCZY & Lukács SZEDERKÉNYI, Ádám KOKESCH, Eva KOŤÁTKOVÁ, Ilona NÉMETH, The Randomroutines / Tamás KASZÁS & Krisztián KRISTÓF, Recetas Urbanas
Collaborating institution: Unterneustädter Schule, Kassel
Curators: Nikolett ERŐSS, Eszter LÁZÁR, Borbála SZALAI, Katalin SZÉKELY (OFF-Biennale Budapest)
Special thanks: Thomas Engelbert; K&K Stauden plant nursery, Kassel; University of Kassel, Department of Landscaping, Landscape Management and Vegetation Development; Unterneustädter Schule, Kassel
OFF-Playground is a space that oscillates between a playground, a junkyard, a construction site—places of creativity, transgression, refuse, and regeneration. It takes you elsewhere: to realities in and beyond dreams. In and around the boathouse Ahoi, the space is being transformed by numerous actors—artists, collectives, architects, children communities, as well as the visitors—enacting construction, mobilizing the boundlessness of imagination, to find a different world beyond the playground fence.
The playground is a microcosm, a world of all spaces. It is a space that embraces a myriad of other spaces, depending on how the children playing there use it and what they think of it. It challenges and subverts prevailing social contexts, architectural norms, and notions of the continuity of space and time. Just like our dreams. Playgrounds are heterotopias, spaces that disrupt the continuity and normality of common everyday places, places removed from ordinary time and determined meaning. They are disjunctures that contest and invert normality and make intermediate worlds tangible.
For most of us, the playground is a space of freedom, experimentation, and risk-taking. On the other hand, it is also an institutionalized space where many children become acquainted with the rules of being in a community for the first time, and where security measures and safety instructions need to be met and followed. The playground equipment and games prescribe a particular mode of use, and in relation to this, as we know well, we constantly bypass and override them in the course of play, creating new games and new rules that understands the world along different correlations.
In a world of ‘whatifs’ and ‘whynots’, play—especially in its role-playing, “as if” guise—not only mimics or symbolizes, but also rewrites and prefigures the ways individuals or communities engage and work with each other, while creating and recreating the social domain, an interlocking web of interactions. Although the projects presented are mostly made from simple (construction or used) materials, they use the power of imagination (from daydreaming to social and ecological utopias), to experiment with models of collaboration and collective action—to explore their possibilities as well as their limitations.
Even before documenta fifteen, the Ahoi boathouse had a specific locality that was open to host new dreams, functions and uses of the space. The works presented in, around and over the building form a kaleidoscopic space that flips reality and puts it in our hands.
Participating artists: AU Workshop (Architecture Uncomfortable Workshop) / Emil Dénes GHYCZY & Lukács SZEDERKÉNYI, Ádám KOKESCH, Eva KOŤÁTKOVÁ, Ilona NÉMETH, The Randomroutines / Tamás KASZÁS & Krisztián KRISTÓF, Recetas Urbanas
Curators: Nikolett ERŐSS, Eszter LÁZÁR, Borbála SZALAI, Katalin SZÉKELY (OFF-Biennale Budapest)
