s-port : summary

S-port : danke

I would like to thank Salome and Tobi for all the help, support and friendship! You made this possible:) I thank Camilo, Cláudio and all the Swissport'09 participants for contributing to such a cool evening and such a nice 'interaction' between Swiss and Portuguese architects (no matter where they were coming from)... I thank the staff of the Carambolage for all the enthusiasm and easy-goingness... That is the spirit we like to find in our venues! Thank you Dulcineia for hosting a great weekend in Basel and the sponsors Diogo and Pedro for being there, once again...

S-port : text

Some episodes of this alphabetical series had been stimulated by external happenings –the first meeting at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, for example, was triggered by Zumthor’s exhibition.
This time, as I was collaborating with the Swissport’09, I proposed to the organizers, Camilo Rebelo and Cláudio Reis, to include Z-A-interaction in the extensive list of side-events related to the workshop, an idea they kindly accepted.
After two weeks of work in Porto and Lausanne between students from FAUP and EPFL – as well as a large number of visits, lectures, etc – the last day consisted on a study trip to the city of Basel and some of its most representative contemporary architecture.
The Swissport’09 was as successful as tiring, so we had to be careful about how to make an interesting and weighted closure without being too much pretentious and prescriptive.
In collaboration with local organizers Salome Rätz and Tobias Jäggli, it was suggested a kind of dinner-event where people could sit and talk, enjoy and relax after a long day that culminated long weeks of conviviality.
We contacted Carambolage, a small arty bar in Kleinbasel with the casual and cozy atmosphere we were looking for. We ordered dinner from two neighboring restaurants, an inconsistent menu of thai food and pizza. The Portuguese beer Super Bock was sold out.
The largest wall on the room was used for projecting videos and photos taken during the Swissport’09. With a certain dose of improvisation, the group was invited to bring their camera’s memory sticks and show what they had captured in Portugal and Switzerland: the workshop and the lectures, the buildings and the sea, the restaurants, the groups and the smiling faces, and so on.
In the S-port we experienced a new format of ‘casual meeting’ and we were happy with it. It showed that there is no ‘receipt’ for making these events interesting, a true ‘interaction’ between ‘international creative people’.
Unfortunately, as it starts to be common as well – remember the t-shirts episode in Lisbon? - something went wrong: I lost my digital camera on that night, probably in the house party we went after the Carambolage. With it, I lost all the photos and videos from the S-port. The only documentation I kept from the dinner-event was a small paper with everybody’s names (I was writing them down as people was paying for their dinner, just for keeping the situation under control :). I was surprised that no one else took photos, which tells a lot about how ‘busy’ everyone was, over the evening… this makes us happy!

Paulo Moreira