What role does storytelling play in urban imaginaries? How do these imaginaries converge or diverge from reality? How can cities be constructed, reconstructed or deconstructed through storytelling? Who tells the story? Who are the characters? Is a city or a building a setting or a character in the story? Can we use stories to test ideas for future architecture?
Stories are, and have been, part of all cultures around the world: from myths to TV series, from fables to radio plays, from epic poems to theatre, from novels to films, from oral histories to video games. Fictional stories have the power to sweep one into a different world, at times to a vision of the future or distant past. And, just like buildings, stories are constructed.
Concrete and Ink: Storytelling and the Future of Architecture, edited by Marta Michalowska and Justinien Tribillon, and published in partnership with nai010 publishers, Rotterdam, brings together commissioned writing in fiction and non-fiction, a graphic story, and interviews, narrating buildings, housing estates and cities, between utopias and dystopias, through imagination, dreaming, magic, games and concrete realities, across past and present, and into the future.
Contributors: Adania Shibli/ Alia Trabucco Zerán/ Alison Irvine/ Bedwyr Williams/ Ben Okri/ Crystal Bennes/ Jodie Azhar/ Justinien Tribillon/ Marta Michalowska/ Matthew Dooley/ Meghana Bisineer/ Mona Kareem/ Natasha Lehrer/ Nina Leger/ Sophie Hughes,/ Sophie Mackintosh.
To celebrate the launch of Concrete and Ink: Storytelling and the Future of Architecture, Theatrum Mundi hosted a virtual evening featuring readings by Ben Okri, Nina Leger and Adania Shibli, and a screening of the short film Dust by artist Meghana Bisineer, and a discussion.
Introduction by one of the editors – Marta Michalowska
Reading by Ben Okri of extracts from his short story The House Below
Screening of Dust by Meghana Bisineer
5:30 mins | Single channel video with sound | made in Bangalore, India | 2020
Observing the rituals of cleansing the entrance to her home, and her body, the departed soul laments to her sisters who perform her last rites. Featuring a traditional folk labour song in Kannada sung by Shilpa Mudabi.
Reading by Nina Leger (in French and English) of extracts from her piece The Life and Death and Life of Antipolis
Reading by Adania Shibli (in Arabic and English) of extracts from her story Word War
Discussion around the themes of the book chaired by Marta Michalowska