Anna Graber

Café des Visions: City Studio – idea for space – forum

As a mobile village square, Café des Visions moves from place to place by means of a bike trailer and questions its respective locations about their potential as social spaces.

Designed as a coffee lounge, the Café invites passers-by to relax, at the same time serving as a forum where ideas can be developed and discussed.
What’s your wish for this place?
How should it be designed?
What should take place here?
What would this place need to make it different from others, so that you would like to spend time here?

Café des Visions is also a city studio and a city laboratory, a place where wishes and visions take shape. The media and materials required for this process, two- and three-dimensional as well as digital ones, are available at the bar. Guests at the Café are invited to express their wishes and/or sketch them.
The visions thus produced are collected and, by being painted on the ground with white, water-soluble paint, transformed into a participatory installation. This gesture of inscribing the room with the requests connects idea and space and makes this connection artistically visible.

On the project website www.cafe-des-visions.ch, the ideas are collected virtually; in the blog, they can be discussed and further developed.
The Café consists of stackable lounge chairs, tables and a bar, all of which fit into the bicycle trailer, which also serves for the café bar.
Café des Visions travels from one place that has potential for change to the next. When set up, it occupies real space and simultaneously, by means of collecting visions, constitutes an ideal space. In this way, it takes the question of how space should be designed and used to where people are and where changes are taking place.

Café des Visions: City Studio – idea for space – forum
Artistic Strategies of Appropriation of Space and the »Production of Desires« utilized for the development of urban areas