In this summer workshop domestic appliances become our imperative to rethink our reliance on conventional energy sources and explore sustainable alternatives that could lead us to a new understanding of its integration. Toasters, microwaves, hairdryers, ovens, blenders, coffee machines, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and dishwashers all fulfil a useful spectrum of functions from culinary mastery to domestic tidings and to personal grooming. Yet, these devices, as our stalwart companions, seamlessly integrated into the rhythm of our daily lifes, have alienated us from their dependable engine, a complex network of resource exploitation and environmental destruction.
By unplugging, transforming and eventually reclaiming domestic appliances, we will create a laboratory of solar curiosities that let us to engage in newly understanding existing technological objects and their energetic usage. Transforming ordinary objects will help us to rethink spatial organisation and reproductive labour while we project its regenerative potentials into the future.
Suddenly the process of hair drying around a human sized solar chimney, could become a group activity that constitutes the methodology of a solar power plant. Together with 15 students of the Vilnius Academy of Arts, we will build prototypes and fragments which harness, reflect, concentrate, absorb and convert the sun rays to dry our hair, fry some eggs or to take a hot shower.
The workshop is a cooperation between the architecture collective inter - (Zurich), the Vilnius Academy of Arts and the non-profit organization Architektūros fondas.