Architectural Intervention

July 17-27, 2018
Curteddhra | Castiglione d’Otranto, Italy

Collaborators:  
Sebastien Tripod 
Benjamin Blachon

Hosted by:
Free Home University
Casa delle Agriculture

As continuation of our previous collaborations with Free Home University and Casa delle Agriculture, Constructlab was invited to Castiglione for a 10 day residency during July 2018. Casa delle Agriculture is a local organisation which approaches sustainable agriculture through education and a model of collaborative social organisation. This year Constructlab focused on the site of the Curteddhra: combining agriculture, a nursery garden, a community kitchen, educational activities and a weekly market, the Curteddhra is the base of the organization and a place for gathering, experimenting and reproducing, both the “social”, as well as the “natural/agricultural”. Within this environment, our task was to redefine a sensitive and re- generative relation between the agricultural activities and their inevitable by-products: the waste of both the land and the people.

In nature, whatever finishes its life-cycle gets incorporated into a new cycle of transformation and is being valorized to generate and feed new forms of life. In the context of agriculture, the question of waste management calls for a whole new system of production/consumption and a holistic transformation of mentality and infrastructures. Our intervention examined the relations between the different activities which take place at the Curteddhra and their respective temporalities, opportunities and demands. While the soil feeds the seeds and the products of the garden are taken to the kitchen to be cooked, transformed and savoured by the community, there is a series of accompanying by-products: in the garden, the kitchen and sub- sequently the toilet, food (its roots, leaves, skin, flesh) is gradually becoming waste. Those three stages of waste production are combined into a system of compost treatment which can transform and reuse them as fertiliZer for the garden.