Favorita’s Waters

A journey into La Favorita peri-urban garden, exploring Palermo’s ancient irrigation systems through speculative design investigations, collectively understanding and shaping materials and resources as a means of social and cultural cohabitation

By tradition, the Mediterranean garden is a space of cultivation, culture, and care. Being a rich reservoir of biodiversity, it further stimulates practices of social cohesion while fostering territorial resistance. The Parco della Favorita in Palermo represents a dense web of nature and artifice, design and spontaneity. The core of its century-long endurance lies in its sophisticated water infrastructure.

Against the contemporary climatic and ecological challenges in Mediterranean cities, the Summer School Favourita’s Waters explores the contemporary role of this peri-urban garden through a week-long intense workshop. Experimenting in practices that combine water and rituals of care, mapping exercises, and archi-botanic surveys form the base for collaborative design interventions conceived as replicable prototypes. Appreciating the interconnectedness of the city in its entity, we will wander around the city of Palermo and explore its natural reservoirs and cultural spaces and their relationship between water and common spaces for conviviality.

Mediterranean garden

La Favorita garden will be the main site of our design interventions, while we will also work and share rituals of commoning in Teatro Garibaldi, hosted by local association Fondazione Studio Rizoma

Speculative design

The school aims to learn from the traditional pioneering irrigation systems of the Mediterranean gardens and produce innovative designs to translate it into contemporary devices amid the role of water as a carrier of social, cultural and environmental significance… the speculations have to be discovered… An irrigation machine? A public fountain? A washbasin? A tank? A steam cloud?

Collective work

The workshop unfolds through on site investigations and common research guided by the workshop mentors, Flavia Saggese and Wunder collective. It will also be spiced up by our guest’s lectures and is supported by many local associations with their unique knowledge. In a second phase, we will test and experiment design prototypes and realise the designs with local ressources.

Sicilian summer

The summer school is a 5 days-long experience of collective research, group works, wanderings, prototyping, lectures, design and construction, shared practices of care and water. It will start on July 5th (arrival date) and will close with a final celebration on July 11th.

«our bodies of water open up to and intertwine with the other bodies of water with whom we share this planet—those bodies in which we bathe, from which we drink, into which we excrete, which grace our gardens and constitute our multitudinous companion species.»

Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water

«The bodies from which we siphon and into which we pour ourselves are certainly other human bodies […], but they are just as likely a sea, a cistern, an underground reservoir of once-was-rain.»
Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water

Changeable, accepting
Merging water, moves fluidly from one from to another
Easily transitioning from clouds to raindrop to sea
Forever changing form but not essence
Water passes through barriers that are impossible to cross in any other way
Water knows no boundaries

Ana Roxanne, Venus

Water teaches us that nothing stands alone.
To follow a river, a bog, a glacier, or an estuary is to move through worlds that precede us and worlds that will outlast us. In its motion, water gathers stories, sediments histories, sutures continents, and reveals the frictions that shape our present planetary condi-tion.
It marks borders and dissolves them; it nourishes life and records its disappearance. It is migrant, cyclical, vulnerable, and yet infinitely resilient.

katya garcía-antón & margarida mendes, the word for world is water