Chodoriwsky & Noufaily appointed to the Jan van Eyck Acadamie
Steven Chodoriwsky collaborates with Farid Noufaily on a joint project called Feral Economies.
Feral marketplaces are the day-to-day sites of constant transaction, bridging the personal economics of daily necessity with the machinations of global markets. All marketplaces are transductive entities: self-tuning instruments, where goods and services commingle ‘freely’ in a perpetual feedback loop. This is especially and by necessity most evident in the space between two geographically adjacent bodies in conflict. Under these conditions, feral economies have been thriving and always seem to find ways to thrive. We would like to interrogate the greater role of these sites, and their ability to allow self-contained, ‘peaceful’ transactions between conflicting bodies.
Our central interests deal with how economies at different scales work in, around and through neutral spaces. How do marketplaces engage, influence or become influenced by their surrounding conditions? How does their presence contribute to their stability? What is the nature of their ongoing evolution — towards embedment or towards dissolution or nomadic behaviour? Following this, we want to investigate the forms of their manifestation as architectural spaces, their scope, their configuration and typologies, their cunning ability to dissolve without a trace, or to grow to the point of legitimacy.
We will take as our starting point the Brcko Arizona Market — a market brought about by a strategic NATO checkpoint, but which has grown so large as to become a town in itself. Through case studies and investigative mapping of this thriving development, we intend to conduct a rigourous reading of the evolution of both the market proper and the roles of its administrative practices. From here, we plan to investigate other case study locations, historical and current, contributing to a greater understanding of their roles within sites of neutrality.
