The Urban FabLab is proud to announce you that the African Fabbers project has been officially selected for participating in the most important African Biennale of Marrakech and Dakar 2014.
For the second step of the project our Lab is glad to invite you to such event that will be held in Dakar (Senegal) from June the 2nd until the13th 2014.
African Fabbers is a social innovation and non-profit project promoted by Urban FabLab. The project is based on the idea of bridging the African and the European makers communities through workshops, collaborative projects, talks etc.
The African Fabbers project develops a temporary and itinerant fab lab putting emphasis on the open source hardware approach for sustainable technologies and urban ecologies. Therefore our Lab organizes free workshops dedicated to African and European makers, students and artisans selected by the local cultural institutions and by an open public call. The workshops are developed in order to share an opportunity to creative clusters from different continents and backgrounds to meet up and share knowledge, to investigate the interaction between African material systems and computer aided design technologies.
In this second step the project will participate at the Dakar Biennale in the framework of the Afropixel festival. The Lab we will put emphasis on a collaborative design approach exploring the interaction between high-tech design processes and ow –tech construction techniques for ecological leaving.
Local and foreigner participants will be asked to design and build through a participatory approach an architectural dwelling for the local fablab “Defko Ak Nep” developed by the Ker Thiossane association.
The prototype scale one to one will be built in a public space with the local community.
The African Fabbers workshop will be split in two phases:
- phase 1 (from 02/06 to 06/06) will be dedicated to develop the design concept of the project using computational design tools and digital fabrication machines
- phase 2 (from 09/06 to 13/06) will be dedicated to build phase 1 design concept exploring self-construction techniques using local (natural and recycled) materials.
During the African Fabbers workshops in Dakar open talks and public sessions will be organized.
African Fabbers is a project curated by Paolo Cascone with Urban FabLab and Maria Giovanna Mancini.
Urban FabLab is a cultural association as well as a lab of ecological design and digital fabrication powered by COdesignLab. The FabLab, hosted by the Science Centre of Naples (Italy), aims to promote the design to make culture integrating advanced and low technologies for collaborative projects with local communities. The project is supported among the others by: COdesignLab, Fondazione Idis/Città della Scienza (Italy), Fondazione architetti e ingegneri liberi professionisti iscritti INARCassa; among the local partners of the project in Dakar: Ker Thiossane, Afropixel, Dakar Biennale
The open call for makers as well as additional information of project will be published on: www.urbanfablab.it - facebook: Urban FabLab ; African Fabbers project
