A playground of an extraordinary marginality

The project investigates the prospects of activating a desolate space in a negligible neighbourhood of Ayios Dometios. By using its peculiar context as a point of departure, I question the means by which ‘intervening’ takes place.

The matter of activating the neighbourhood, prompted me to investigate spatiality through the coexistence between architectural or non-elements. The anthropologist Tim Ingold uses the term taskscape to indicate this kind of spatiality, “that emerges through agency (human and non-human) and is the constantly changing correlate of social activity - neither objective nor a representational construct.” The phenomenological dimension of physical engagement, as well as the interactivity of behaviours, put the notion of taskscape into an operative play: as Ingold prompts, “where social and enclosed spatial activity do not occupy space but constitute space itself." \nIn a second reading, the matter of marginalisation and social inertia, promoted the necessity for tools in re-considering the common needs and behaviours into a collectively formed entity. By forming these tools I attempt to expand current opportunities, enhancing day-to-day activities in negotiating: a communal kitchen where the elderly could prepare meals for the children coming from school, a communal garden with a chicken-coop and an open play field. The porous engagement with the existing context and the generosity of space, form the basis for appropriation and redefinition of behavioural spatiality.\nThe intentions of these gestures seek to re-activate and maintain collaborative relationships, as well as, to provide tools tailored to the local action. As Momoyo Kaijima said, “attention to people’s behaviour relativizes this rhetoric in an effort to liberate the possibilities of co-ownership and community.” Intervening then results as an attempt to liberate these possibilities. Within its subtlety, the architectural intervention set the basis for an ?????-alana; the notion of a lively (perhaps a bit transgressive) playground within the everydayness.