Framing the Common

Framing the Common
. 2015 – 2016
. Tehran (WORKNOT!), Bogota (CAMPO), Kuala Lumpur (Normal Architecture), Mumbai (ROOM)
. Tehran team directed by Golnar Abbasi, Arvand Pourabbasi, in collaboration with Mobasher Niqui and Ramtin Taherian. Participating members include Monireh Askari, Dadbeh Mohebbi, Niloufar Emamifar, Amir Pourmoghaddam, Molood Jaberi Najafabadi.

Framing the Common is a collective project done in collaboration between teams in four cities: Tehran, Bogota, Kuala Lumpur, and Mumbai. It attempted to thoroughly read the Modern apartments of these cities, in order to map out the spaces of Modernity that have formed in the margins of the global hierarchies of (spatial) knowledge.

The collective project aimed to read the Modern project of housing, ‘the apartment’, through the point of view of its shared spaces; spaces that take on the important role of spatial distribution through regulations, while being used in ways not expected by those regulations (as storage, as gathering place, etc). In this project these spaces are studied in relation to a set of subject such as, precrity and nomadism, visibility, individualism, etc.

The Common here has a multifold position. It refers to the commonly–owned shared spaces of apartments ; but also to their condition of sameness, repetition, standardization, while also to processes of commoning, and to what we already have in common as human-subjects. The deliberate aim of this research is to shift the discussion of collective housing away from the private living units towards the sphere of the Commoning. Freed from the individual idiosyncracies, the living units is subjected to rules, regulations and enforcement beyond the control of any individual homeowners, becoming a strange in–between zone which is clearly no longer private, but is not fully public either.

The project concluded with a book collection and multiple exhibitions.

The Tehran project has continued in various other forms, including the program Narrating the Shared Spaces.