The ring project at its core, is a process rather than a product and is thus ongoing and never finished.

In 2009, the architecture platform common room developed a circular ring for Dexter Sinister in New York. This design was later reinterpreted for Casco (Utrecht) and Radio Athènes (Documenta 14, Athens). The design and scale of the ring ask for different reactions and social constellations. Recently common room, together with Ward Heirwegh / Sleeperhold Publications, reduced the scale of the ring (to 40 cm), and made a limited edition of 17. These 17 rings were given to a specific group of artists, writers, curators and architects who were asked to appropriate the ring on their turn. Vandevelde decided to make the ring part of the Precarious Pavilions project and he approaches it as a pavilion into a pavilion. The ring will, in one way or another, always be part of each new Precarious Pavilions, until the ring is lost.

The ring, proposes not only a scaled down version of the original circular object (of 2009), but also proposes a design for a space where people gather, in its most reduced and minimalist form. Whatever the amount of precarity we might encounter, the circle as a social space, this simple architecture, might be the first kind of spatial organization humankind will always return to.


Created by Ward Heirwegh / Sleeperhold Publications and common room

Curated by Michiel Vandevelde


Production: Disagree. vzw