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Mobile Engawa

Mobile Engawa is a participatory urban intervention designed to activate spatial imagination and civic dialogue in the everyday landscape of Chiba. Conceived as a movable public platform, it consists of a modular structure and a series of transformable cubes that function as both expressive devices and participatory tools. Installed in overlooked or transitional spaces around Chiba Station, the project invites citizens to articulate their visions, frustrations, and desires for the city by inscribing, assembling, or altering these cubes—transforming them into micro-architectures of collective thought. Drawing on the Japanese concept of engawa—a threshold space between interior and exterior—the installation fosters informal encounters, civic play, and shared authorship. Developed in six phases, from research and design to post-installation reactivation, Mobile Engawa reframes public space as a site of co-creation. It bridges art and urbanism, not as spectacle, but as a method to re-sensitize citizens to the lived textures, frictions, and futures embedded in their built environment.

Schedule

・May 9–17, 2025: Artwork creation, workshops, and research on exhibition venues
・May 18–30, 2025: Carriage and budget decisions
・June 1–July 31, 2025: Redesign and drawing of the “mobile Engawa”
・August 1–30, 2025:Creation of the “mobile Engawa” Production of the “Mobile Engawa
・September 15–24, 2025: Implementation of interactive programs (workshops) aimed at engaging with the public during the intensive exhibition period.
・ October 19–24, 2025: Implementation of interactive programs (workshops) aimed at engaging with the public during the intensive exhibition period.

Chaal.Chaal.Agency

Sebastián Trujillo-Torres is a designer, researcher, and lecturer with extensive professional experience in Colombia and India. His field of practice ranges from the engineering of design methodologies and constructive processes, to the elaboration of adaptive objects and spatialities. He co-founded Chaal.Chaal.Agency, a design-research collaborative project that investigates issues and potentialities particular to Global South urbanisms as templates for global imaginations, with the aim of triggering larger transformations through small-scale interventions. Kruti Shah is an architect, researcher, and academician based in Mumbai, India, and founding partner of Chaal.Chaal.Agency. She obtained her undergraduate degree from the Academy of Architecture, Mumbai, and later pursued her postgraduate studies at CEPT University, where she earned a Master’s degree in Architectural Design and was awarded the Erasmus+ fellowship. She has been invited to speak at many institutions worldwide, including Carnegie Mellon University, the Politecnico di Milan, Bauhaus Universität in Weimar, Virserum Konsthall (Sweden), School of Environment and Architecture (Mumbai), and FOAID (Delhi). She has been a co-recipient of the DXD–Sanskriti Fellowship 2022 and was selected as an artist for the ‘Beyond the Blueprint’ initiative by KHOJ International Artists’ Association. Most recently, she was selected among 80 women architects to showcase her work as part of the ‘Samatva: Shaping the Built’ Pavilion at the India Art, Architecture and Design Biennale 2024 in Delhi.
More details

Exhibitions & events of this art project