Educational Material

The World And The Flock speculates about the capacities of the famous Geneva sheep flock to change our perception of the city. Thus, the flock that roams the gardens of Jardin des Nations, the heart of so called International Geneva, becomes a connecting and form-making element. The project offers an alternative reading, beyond the dispersed, isolated and fenced estates of International Geneva. The circulating flock becomes a spatial factor that is ordering social realtions through the (un)built. Seen, observed, monitored, the event unfolds its impact on multiple channels: from the physical to the digital. Thereby, the public space which nowadays is weakly articulated, scattered and isolated within the city of Geneva, becomes more connected and attractive to both locals and tourists and not only for members of International Geneva. Ingredients Grass, fences, water, trees – everything the flock needs can be found on site. The only missing elements, were a barn and salt for the sheep to winter. The flock is kept on rotating pastures, called padocks. There it grazes for four days before moving on, rotating from land to land, using normal asphalt roads. In the course of one year, the flock visits the United Nations, the U.S. Mission, the Rothschild estate, and many others. Every last weekend of the month, the flock leaves the Jardin des Nations and moves into the city. This urban event reconnects the isolated Jardin des Nations with the city of Geneva which is itself a city of (dis)connected madows.

Deep in the rainforest of Eastern Cameroon is the first and only museum of the Baka pygmy people in the world. The building is like a portal from the forest to social structures like a village. In this participatory museum the Baka from Bifolone are both the actors and subject, together with the the NGO the new patrons they created a place completely displaying their needs and identy. While the Baka face the loss of their habitat and culture this building - "le grand Mungulu" (the big hut) - is a architectional landmark that displays 'we are not gone, yet'.

The film aims to repurpose 2000 acres of underperforming and marginalized land for shared timber farming to enact a more adequate synergistic relationship (socio-economically and environmentally) between the built space and the fragmented Hudson Valley’s forest. In Hudson Valley, most of the trees are privately owned, growing on land at the fringe of urban development- Wildland Urban Intermix (WUI). Tackling the large-scale U.S. monopoly of engineered-timber products, the project envisions a bottom-up timber economy- a vertically integrated, resilient timber supply chain- as a way to incentivize private landowners to sustainably manage their own forests while directly accessing a shared infrastructure of researching, harvesting, manufacturing, and retail, waste-recycling, and branding for their timber product. By creating shared collaborative infrastructure for local forest and small-timber-business owners and entrepreneurs, new social partnerships and equally-distributed amenities will be created, boosting local economies while preserving the local and regional forest ecologies. By sustaining long-term forest-plant-based economic development through this shared co-op system, Hudson Valley’s scaled-down timber industry will be funneled while a more socially adequate distribution of profits between diverse communities will be achieved. Composed of four entities, the Center for Resilient Forestry, which is clustered with Wood Innovation Facilities, the Certification Centers, the Sawmill and Distribution Center with additional facilities for Recycling and Storage and Renewable Energy Generation, this project provides a lasting infrastructure that promotes a holistic framework for profitable and sustainable timber agroforestry that ensures the wellbeing of both the forest and its inhabitants.