Reflection by Resolve Collective
Resolve Collective is an interdisciplinary design collective that addresses social issues through architecture, art and technology. Their work focuses on involving and serving young people and under-represented groups in society. Here, they reflect on the challenges that Covid-19 has brought to the participatory approach of their work.
In our practice, we employ a number of different tools and techniques in order to create spaces that bring people together, working with different stakeholders and communities in different places and alongside different collaborators. As such, our physical presence as practitioners is the only fundamental tenet of our practice and in this way, COVID largely dismantled the only fundamental consistency in our work.
We were in Germany when the country went under lockdown, working on a project for the Kunstverein in Braunschweig on the life of 18th Century Ghanaian German philosopher Anton Wilhelm Amo. Unable to stay and finish the project build, we were forced to return to the UK and complete the project both digitally and remotely. COVID caused a similar disruption to another project we were working on in Purley Way in Croydon, South London, where engaging residents and users of the area was a vital part of ours and the local council’s vision to establish an equitable vision for the future of the area. Both projects were adapted digitally, opening up exciting new realms for our practice that we will continue to pursue. However, COVID did far more to confirm to us the resolute importance of physically coming together in spaces and reinforced, for us, the need to position ‘community’ at the centre of any plan aimed at ‘rebuilding’ in the prolonged aftermath of this pandemic.
by Resolve Collective