de Appel Periodical #2: Making Room – The Home as Common Ground by Gabriella Okoobo

Description

de Appel Periodical is a biannual online publication by de Appel’s team and invited contributors. It offers reflection and context around our programme and archive in the periods between exhibitions, bringing forward conversations, archival materials, interviews and outcomes of workshops or gatherings that are not always publicly visible. Unlike the regular newsletter, it moves more slowly: looking back, inward and sideways.

This second edition of the Periodical lands in your inbox right after the closing of Building a House Without Bricks, and extends some of the thematic threads that were present in the exhibition, taking ‘shared space’ as its point of departure. Rather than referring to one particular kind of space, making room describes an action: opening, sharing, shaping and sustaining the conditions in which people can spend time, live and act together. It can begin in a living room, kitchen or cooperative building, as well as in a café or another kind of third place. It can also begin in an act of trust, a decision to share responsibility or a collective refusal to leave.