Uncommon Building book launch

Theatrum Mundi is pleased to announced the release of Uncommon Building: Collective Excavation of a  Fictional Structure, ed. by Honor Gavin and Adam Kaasa, published by Matthew Cheeseman and Paul Bareham at Spirit Duplicator, and designed by Manu Meyer sand Sevi Landolt at Gol Grafik.  

This publication has its provenance in an experimental workshop held in Sheffield, UK, in April 2016. Jointly organised by Theatrum Mundi and the University of Sheffield, the workshop brought together a multidisciplinary group of creative practitioners, scholars, and theorists and invited them to contribute their expertise to a collaborative archaeology of a nonexistent building, a lost structure or structure of loss of which virtually nothing was known. 

Effectively a collective exercise in speculative fiction, the workshop in Sheffield generated the findings archived in the guidebook contained in this publication. It also elicited a series of conversations between participants on themes such as the following: the relationship between the real and the fictive and the material and the imaginary, cultural value in the context of the built environment, time and the urban, media archaeology, dissociation as creative process, and the possibilities of speculative fiction as a form of cross-disciplinary methodology. 

Because our uncommon building is by no means the only one, the publication also includes an instructional manual. This provides some guidelines as to how to collectively excavate an uncommon building of your own and is intended as a pedagogical tool without purpose or given horizon. 

Contributors include: Fabienne Collignon, Paul Bareham, Matt Westbrook, Sam Ladkin, Stephen Walker, Alexander Marsh, Manca Bajec, Linda Kemp, Jon Orlek, Vicky Illott, Matthew Cheeseman, Rosa Ainley, and Miranda Iossifidis.

Theatrum Mundi is a network of people from the performing and visual arts, the built environment disciplines, from across the academy and community and social collectives. Based in London, with partnerships in New York, Paris and Beijing, it activates projects, meetings, and research in cities around the world.