Community Pavillon will be showing

Comuna under construction (Azzellini/Ressler 2010, 94 min.)

The HUSTADT PROJECT is a process. It is and a series of projects taking place in Hustadt, Bochum (Ruhr Area, Germany). As a process it is composed of several parts: the research of the existing situation that includes many formal and informal meetings, discussions, and workshops with people living in Hustadt. Out of this research the aim is to create the conditions for public participation (parallel to an official participatory urban planning process) and together with a group of inhabitants make a suggestion that can influence and definitely shift the official planning proposal for Hustadt. The whole process has been leading into the drafting of a proposal for a Community Pavilion – Brunnenplatz 1 – a meeting place for people living in Hustadt; to encourage them to act and re-act on present conditions, outside of official social institutions, to create a place by themselves and for themselves. The Community Pavilion – Brunnenplatz 1 is a network of activities suggested by inhabitants themselves: a summer kitchen, a seating place, a small performance stage, an outdoor cinema, a bicycle-repair workshop, and much more. The goal is to create a place that would generate and inspire everybody living in the neighborhood.

Statement by Community Pavillon organizer Apolonija Šušteršič:

I was invited to make a public work for the central marketplace in Hustadt, on the outskirts of Bochum, Germany . When beginning to investigate the conditions of the area, I found a number of interesting issues and formed my project around these. The issues in question are related to the equitable distribution of socio-political power in public space, internationalisation of culture and questions around public participation.

Hustadt Project – is developing into a project where public participation has become a very important generator of the project itself. It became a challenge to the usual passivity, and non-activity of the public concerning the shaping of their environment, and the strictly regulated behaviour within planning processes. However the project also revels problems in relation to motivations, expectations and formal definition of participatory processes as perceived by official city politics.

This collaborative, consultative approach has deep and complex roots in the history of community work, cultural activism, and dialogical art.
The project circulates around questions of publicity and the public realm. It is focused on and discussed distributions of power in the public realm, the issue of “spatial justice”, and the appropriation of public space as understood by different actors.