Schellenberg on the Edge
YEAR
2022
INSTITUTION
Verein ELF
A village is sometimes best understood from its edges.
Atelier Gapont runs Verein ELF as a laboratory for transformative urbanism — urbanism conceived as the cultivation of public realms in which a place's future is imagined together with the people who live there.
Schellenberg was the fourth — the smallest focus municipality so far, a ridge of settlement islands with stretches of nature between them, looking out across the Unterland and over the Austrian border.
We took the village's many edges as starting points with the focus topic Ränder und Räume — edges and spaces.
The year began with a methodological shift. After four iterations of running a fixed Karta-Bar as the year's base camp, we let the sites travel — a Karta-Bar in motion, each realm placed where it already carried its own argument.
Grenzwertig opened the year on the border to Oberfresch, half in Liechtenstein, half in Austria — neutral ground for a discussion on the stories intertwined with political and geographic borders.
Ränder des Wachstums met at the south-western edge of the village to test the paradox of economic growth and environmental concern.
Gesellschaftsränder und Dorfmitten on the Dorfplatz, Kaffee, Kuchen und Ahnenforschung on a Saturday morning at the recycling yard.
The Schellenberger Quartierkongress in the Hotel Krone with delegates from eight neighbourhoods — these were among the new formats we built, each less reliant on a familiar arrangement and more on the gravity of its site.
The Karta-Talks, a one-on-one interview format, moved too. Instead of recordings in a fixed studio, we walked — with a local planner across the village, with a farmer through the Riet, with the parish priest back in his parlour when the microphones gave out.
With the fifth grade we ran a three-part workshop at the village model — the village as it grew, the village as it is, the village twice as full. A slow oscillation between the known and the possible, with children as authors of both.
Two further realms ran beyond Schellenberg's edges — Mobilität at the Schaaner domus and Urbanität at the Engländerbau in Vaduz. The project's material had begun to resonate inside other people's frames; the laboratory was leaking out of its enclosure.
The year closed on 17 December with (Ver)Brauchtum in the Gemeindesaal, on rituals that still structure shared time. The laboratory had been more itinerant than in any year before, and had learned more from where it stretched than from where it stayed.
Presse
