Skin on Skin

2022 Diploma, Die Angewandte,
studio diazmoreno garciagrinda

Queer Community Club/Centre and Kombucha Factory, Tbilisi, Georgia

Skin on Skin aims to create a safe and brave space that encourages plurality. Built around, and with other agents as co-creators as well as co-contributors, it is focused on but not limited to humans and microbes. It puts forward a space where all agents can consciously coexist while being interdependent outside scientific environments. Instead, these relations are intertwined within the design and its wider urban context.

Firstly , the project puts scientific and technical innovations such as the use of kombucha as an organic building material in the hands of progressive grass root communities, which can consequently support the fight for political and social progress. Skin on Skin acts as a ‘social factory’ where events such as drag balls, club nights, leather fetish meet-ups are not just the free expressions of a given community, but also critical to the growth of the kombucha membranes, capturing the heat within the building itself.

Through architecture, the project challenges the given power relations within society, as well as the relationships that humans have with their ‘anthropogenic world’, being no longer at the centre, but rather a one integrated within the complex series of interdependencies - bacteria and built form - skin on skin on skin.

XAVIER MADDEN

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