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Amica Dall

The Work of Repair

22—2—2023
7.30pm
COA (Centre Obert d'Arquitectura)
Plaça Nova 5 Barcelona

PAST TALK

Amica Dall is an inter-disciplinary practitioner focused on architecture and city culture and children's right to the city. She is a founding member of Assemble, where she delivered more than 15 major projects over ten years. Her work as a writer and filmmaker has been broadcast on the BBC, exhibited at the Venice Biennale, and published in E-Flux, among many others. She recently co-wrote a book on post-carbon future for architecture in the UK with architecture practice, Material Cultures, published by Mack Books, and is collaborating on the writing of an Assemble edited volume for Common Ground on the contemporary conception of the rural. She is afounding trustee of Baltic Street Adventure Playground and also of Theatrum Mundi, a creative arts research organization initiated by Richard Sennett in 2016, With postgraduate training in Anthropology of the Built Environment at UCL, Amica has taught across a wide range of subjects and works with both children and post-graduates. She currently runs a new seminar course, Childhood, Culture, Design, at the Architectural Association, is teaching on the Masters in Situated Practice at the Bartlett School of Architecture. She is currently collaborating with artist Cristina Lina Fraser on a number of projects, including participatory filmmaking with the Working Children's Movement in Peru, and children's strategy for the European City of Culture in Chemnitz, 2024.

Assemble is a multi-disciplinary collective working across architecture, design and art. Founded in 2010 to undertake a single self-built project, Assemble has since delivered a diverse and award-winning body of work, whilst retaining a democratic and co-operative working method that enables built, social and research-based work at a variety of scales, both making things and making things happen. Assemble were awarded the Turner Prize in 2016, and in 2022 the founders were nominated to the Royal Academy in recognition of their collective contribution to the culture of city making.

The Work of Repair
Amica will reflect on how architectural and creative practices can orientate themselves away from invention and innovation towards the patient and slow work of repair, and consider work that is based on making long-term, personal or ethical commitments to sites, situations, and social contexts. She will cover some of Assemble's early work, before discussing a set of projects that reorientated her and the studio's attitudes towards the city and the rural, material ethics and intergenerational justice.