The WaterSchool Classroom
Exhibition October 27 — December 03, 2023
local Galeria da Biodiversidade — Centro Ciência Viva/MHNC-UP , Porto
curador Studio Makkink & Bey
Core Programme
The WaterSchool Classroom exhibition is dedicated to water in all its facets. Two rooms of the Biodiversity Gallery will be transformed into a ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’. Precursors of modern day museums, these cabinets of curiosities arose from collectors gathering objects and artefacts from many strands of artistic, scientific and intellectual endeavour in order to display them side by side ignorant of any categorisation or classification. Interactive and hands-on in nature, these collections actively invited exploration and curiosity, whilst simultaneously serving to tell a particular story about the world and its history as imagined by their collector.
Continuing this tradition, The WaterSchool Classroom exhibition presents a wide variety of works by invited artists, architects and designers united within the speculative framework of the WaterSchool. Within the exhibition, these serve as conversation starters, in order to instigate discussions on how dwelling, living and working could be rethought and even redesigned bearing water and its impact in mind.
Exhibition Opening
27.10.2023 - 12 pm
+ info
Galeria da Biodiversidade — Centro Ciência Viva / MHNC-UP
Rua do Campo Alegre, 1191, 4150-181 Porto
Tuesday to Sunday
10:00 — 13:00, 14:00 — 18:00
Last admission: 17:30
The WaterSchool is a self-initiated design research project by Studio Makkink & Bey since 2012 within which they explore how schools and entire neighbourhoods could be (re)developed to minimise their ecological water footprint. Till now it is a speculative school delving into this. It is designed and organised around water as an essential material, subject and social and political phenomenon. It proposes rethinking of the cultural, didactical, holistic and infrastructural model of education through having all these facets relate to a certain topic, being water. This school could produce everything it needs to function onsite through small-scale industrial and craft producers together with selected designers, architects and artists.
Herein, the school is the centre of the neighbourhood and has an exemplary function, showing and teaching its pupils as well as the associated community how one could live differently bearing water in mind. It does so by (re)positioning its curriculum through thinking how the subjects taught at school could be approached starting from or relating to water. Furthermore the school building shows in both its interior and exterior how the built environment could be (re)developed in order to minimise its ecological water footprint. From the school, the research extends outwards imagining how dwelling, living and working could be rethought to reduce their respective footprint on the scale of a neighbourhood.
Studio Makkink & Bey is led by architect Rianne Makkink and designer Jurgen Bey. Based in Rotterdam, the studio works in various domains of applied art and includes public space projects, product design, architecture, exhibition design and applied arts.