Work The Flying S
Flying walking science with our nomadic furniture
Untapped design potentials for participatory projects become visible through our urban research approach processes: playable interspaces, cultural exchange, vacancy utilization, touristic attractiveness, redistribution of spaces and sensitization for the urban landscape. Together we discover new heterotopic spaces in order to change and question the status quo of urban and landscape spaces. Through constant emergence, long-term observations and changes of perspective as well as close, open and flexible testing of common spaces with local people, we bind the potential of city dwellers and their living spaces.
Through nomadic wanderings and urban walks with our mobile street furniture, we break up familiar everyday structures and the sedentary nature of urban life. Through our furniture, we join forces with snack bars, stores and institutions in the city in an installative way so that everyone involved in the city can experience themselves as independent actors in their district and contribute their spatial needs. By assembling our furniture together, we immediately involve all local people in the square. The modularity of our upygecycled furniture enables a wide range of possible combinations and variable uses.
Our building laboratory
Our motivation is to spark speculative curiosity and experimentation for artistic, research-based and performative approaches in our building laboratory. To this end, we set up workbenches and build with residents in public spaces.
We use electric and manual hand tools such as Japanese saws, cordless and hand drills and sanding blocks. Together with the residents, we create an open process in which we realize experimental prototyping or joint construction on various topics. In doing so, we build with upcycled materials that we want to continue to explore speculatively with the residents in the spirit of our nomadic, physical community art and socially engaged design between design, art and experiment.
We incorporate the unbeatable expertise of all urban actors, some of whom are invisible, into our situational design. Here we practice, bundle and initiate our own creative powers, our physical awareness and our ability to act, as well as internal and external processes of change in the city and its actors. Through artistic, collaborative action, we hold spaces of experience and responsibility together and try out diverse, physically performative and installative possibilities of touch and (non-verbal) communication to negotiate (im)material spaces and boundaries.
Through nomadic, site-specific interactions in our building laboratory and in different urban structures, we build a bridge between everyday life and culture, the diverse actors of the city and their situations. Through the joint design process, we will become a body / Flying S together with all participants.
The Tunkomats
The Tunkomats are small, hand-operated, mechanical-analog machines made of wood that trigger a humorous serving process such as pouring, throwing, cutting, dipping or pushing via a sliding movement that can only be driven by two people.
In April 2023, we built and developed these together with Burbacher:innen and Völklinger:innen as part of our experimental construction laboratory. Through our physical, experience-oriented construction and community activities in Burbach and Völklingen, we offered all participants, especially children and young people, an open, independent and experimental approach to tools and interaction with each other.
Our collaborative Social Engaged Design and Commoning practice showed that every human energy involved is crucial for a sustainable, post-mining Burbach and Völklingen growing together.
Our tunkomatic connectors, which were brought together at a large table as part of performative food happenings, encouraged people to collectively negotiate and emotionally experience these human energies, perspectives and ways of life, at least in pairs, by pushing them physically and communicatively. In this way, Burbach and Völklingen community spaces were stimulated, established and consolidated in their urban landscapes.
TunkoMatic!
An interactive, exploratory, interdisciplinary, connective exhibition on the growth of a Burbach community
As part of a TunkoMatic exhibition in cooperation with the Kulturverein Burbach, our Tunkomats found a place in the Kulturverein for a month in September and continued to be dipped, thrown, pushed, poured and cut. As a small specialty from, for and with Burbach, we jointly developed the Burbach cookie, the “Burback” (sweet and salty), in which new, individual Burbach recipes were kneaded together, thus combining a variety of flavors and the internationality of Burbach. The cookie could be consumed in various participatory food performances via the machines’ experience trail, whereby we collected its recyclable plastic packaging in order to recycle it into a Burbach chair after the exhibition, which playfully and haptically preserves the energetic participation of the people of Burbach in the Tunkomats on an ongoing basis in the cultural association.
Through intensive support for a wide range of events organized by the cultural association at the language café, women’s meeting and lectures, a performative baking group came together for a large portion of salty burbacks, which enlivened and stirred up our performative-culinary, final Tunkomaten event on the doorstep and in the cultural association with numerous contributors. This socially sticky community experience left us hungry for more Burbach and more “Burbacks”.
We, the Fliegende S, and our Tunkomats will be back!
