Lecture 'The Ambition of the Territory' by Christoph Grafe

13 November 2012

On Tuesday 13 November, Christoph Grafe, director of the Flemish Architecture Institute and commissioner of the Belgian entry for the Venice Biennial, will give a lecture at NAiM/Bureau Europa.

Christoph Grafe is the director of the Flemish Architecture Institute and as commissioner he is directly involved in the Belgian entry to this Venice Biennial. OnTuesday the 13th of November at NAiM/Bureau Europa, he presented the research and ideas behind the choices for the Belgian pavilion in his lecture 'The Ambition of the Territory'. 

The entry (by the design collective AWJGGRAUaDVVTAT) concentrates on the question what Flanders will look like in the future. What will the role of the policymaker, the market, the citizen (and the designer) be, in organizing high-quality interaction between various claims on space? Which ambitions and which operational perspectives are already included in the territory of today’s demographic, economic, ecological and social-cultural reality?  At the core of these questions is the notion of territory that gives rise to experiment and can be seen as a laboratory for the transition to a metropolitan Europe.

We placed the results of these speculative design studies in the Dutch, and particularly the Euregional context: Learning from Flanders.

After the lecture, Jake Wiersma, senior urban developer at the City of Maastricht, responded to Christoph Grafe's presentation.  

This lecture was in line with the long-term program ‘Landscape in Perspective’ (a collaboration between NAiM/Bureau Europa, Marres Projects and the Province of Limburg). It addressed the question of the specific situation of the local, as this was examined in the exhibition Couleur Radicaal, an initiative of Marres Projects in collaboration with Schunck*.

Date: Tuesday 13 November
Time:  8 – 10 pm
Language: Dutch

Venue: NAiM/Bureau Europa, Avenue Céramique 226, 6221 KX Maastricht