This workshop considers the Praille-Aca cias-Vernets (PAV) industrial zone as a space of freedom. This Geneva-based territory is governed by a specific urban grammar, made up of tacit and collective rules negotiated between users. These rules generate spaces with more free modalities of use, where everything seems possible. This quality is strengthened by the state of transformation of the territory, which appears to float between what it has been and what it will become, revealing an in-between that merits exploration if we wish to discover its opportunities.
The workshop specifically refers to these in-betweens: ambiguous spaces, interstices with open meanings, invitations to interpretation, sensory engagement, and subjective investigation. These spaces constitute a breach conducive to the emergence of the unexpected: an opportunity for novelty, a terrain for punctual, specific, time-free, and liberating experiments.
The workshop explores the potential of these spaces. It questions their possible uses and how to transform these places without freezing them, enhancing their qualities without denaturing them, in order to preserve them as spaces of freedom and opportunity within the PAV. Facade, kiosk, delivery quay: how can we repurpose these elements to multiply their uses and generate new urban narratives? What opportunities, what possibilities?
The workshop is structured in three phases: explore, conceive, and activate. Participants begin by exploring the PAV territory before defining a suitable use for the site, one that can extend over time and enable new appropriations. It culminates in the creation of an installation, the result of collective work, revealed during a public opening.
The workshop features the possibility for participants to stay in an atelier within the PAV (subject to confirmation). The left image shows Pierre Musy & Romain Iff (collective xenia), Gauthier Füllemann, Denis Sermaxhaj, in the context of PAV living room, 2024. The right image features Drift–Signal, Amir-Sam Halabi, Meryl Barthe, Piotr Kadlubowski, also in PAV living room, 2025. The left image is © Camille Wetzel and the right image is © Valentine Blaimont.
The evaluation is based on participation in the five days of the workshop and on the degree of active engagement of the student(s).