KoCA Inn

Project KoCA Inn

During two weeks UrbanDÆ, a temporary research group based in Weimar and Salvador da Bahia, occupied the Kiosk of Contemporary Art, the Sophienstiftsplatz and the surrounding traffic islands. Urban creativity inherent to survival strategies was imported from the tropics and collaborative community experiences still present in many East German’s memories were revisited. They were embedded in an urban-artistic device that invited passers-by to engage with its ever-changing facilities: a mini hotel, a mobile kitchen, a showroom, a café, a dance hall, a black market of knowledge and skills, a library, a TV room, a gambling salon, a play ground, all as if it were in a tropical resort. Mixing up Brazilian and East German aesthetics, KoCA Inn was an evolving-living-experimental space, or a favela-like organism growing on 62 square meters of Weimar’s main intersection.
Issues on consumerism, cultural tourism, intercultural dialogue, tolerance and freedom, public security and public conviviality were addressed.

Its improvised, precarious, recycled, never-finished structure was a device to informalize and flexibilize the sterile, protected and over-controlled usage of local public spaces. At the same time KoCA Inn encouraged self-organization, collaboration and collective creativity, testing techniques of research-creation that mix academic thought and artistic-urban practices. Ideas around the themes of situatedness, positionality, horizontal knowledge exchange and extradisciplinarity were experimented in a relaxed and hammock-based public ambience.

KoCA Inn was a 2 years collaborative artistic-urban research between the two involved universities UFBA and BUW (march 2008 – may 2010). It existed for 2 years, but it grew out of previous researches and projects developed by members of Urbandæ. However, collaborations and partnerships that emerged out of this context are unfolding new projects. KoCA Inn took place as a public event for 2 weeks in Weimar. (2009)
The projects budget was 34.000 € (Fonds-Soziokultur Deutschland, DAAD, Diakoniestiftung GmbH, Stuko der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, KulturTragWerk e.V., PROAE/UFBA | Pró-Reitoria de Assistência Estudantil – Universidade Federal da Bahia).

Organisation UrbanDÆ

The group was founded in March 2008 by Daniela Brasil, as she invited 7 people to create a “temporary research group” to participate in the Corpocidade platform of actions, coordinated by Paola Berenstein Jacques and Fabiana Dultra Britto, which took place in Salvador da Bahia, October 2008. http://www.corpocidade.dan.ufba.br

Initially, Daniela Brasil is responsible for the content of the tasks and topics. During the process UrbanDÆ members took over responsibilities and production of content according to personal levels of involvement. As the project was taking form, acquainted people spontaneously joined in, totalizing 18 members. While the project was being run in public space, a few citizens also took initiative and proposed their own topics and activities.

For the catalogue production, a group of editors was created with Daniela Brasil, Catherine Grau, Theresa Dietl and Bernhard König, being the 4 responsible for content, management and editing. Yet, the catalogue’s aim was to put together relates of experiences, opinions and perspectives from various participants and invited authors.