Sweet&Salt is one of the seven flagships of the Rijeka 2020 – European Capital of Culture project. Sweet&Salt contemplates, analyzes, designs and unifies a complex space consisting of the Rječina River canyon, the bank of Delta surrounded by the Dead Canal and the lower stream of the Rječina River with old port infrastructure, its depots and the sealine of the Rijeka Port and Porto Baross.
Sweet&Salt is a project that – in exploring the phenomenology of an industrial city in transition – connects diverse scientific, research and educational activities with the lifelong learning initiative at the University of Rijeka. Sweet&Salt is a series of coordinated activities in time and space that employ various artistic interventions, moderate and articulate participatory processes and organize urbanist spatial interventions in order to re-novate, re-construct and re-program forgotten areas of the city, revive its industrial infrastructure and permanently transform a space shaped by decades of ideologies and strictly defined functions.
During the period from 2017 and 2020, Sweet&Salt will include intensive processes of education, research, concrete urban planning and designing as the foundations of its Laboratory for Urban Reinvention. This platform will bring together scientists and specialists from diverse backgrounds and with different expert profiles, enabling them to collaborate on the urgent issues of urban development, fostering creative ideas, implementing strategies of action and conducting activities of urban reinvention. The Laboratory is jointly established by the University of Rijeka, the Primorje-Gorski Kotar County and the City of Rijeka, along various legal entities and freelance experts. The Laboratory will remain fully independent in all of its activities, fostered only by its founders.
Having articulated its ideology by extensively discussing, revising and resuming different perspectives on concrete global phenomena and local processes, as well as by engaging in various participatory processes, social actions and media platforms, the Sweet&Salt flagship develops artistic interventions that organize and design both public and private spaces. It thus encourages a new mode of perceiving, activating and using the paradoxical and multifaceted – unbounded, restricted and strictly contained – space of the Sweet&Salt zone.
Focusing on the concrete topics of work and migrations, and analyzing water as a narrative, a resource, an infrastructural element and a source of energy, the Sweet&Salt flagship proposes new modes of living in abandoned and neglected industrial spaces. The Sweet&Salt flagship tackles the issues of housing, leisure, work and sustainable food production. It explores the potential of reviving vacant areas and employing alternative energy sources to produce authentic RI-Food, ensure RI-Housing and provide RI-Work. Sweet&Salt scrutinizes the somewhat uncritical global genuflexion toward the benign ideal of technology by rethinking the philosophical justification of a wisely organized Smart City.
Habitats, co-working spaces, urban agriculture and local fish farming become parts of urban infrastructure. They are transposed into vibrant places foe living, working, producing, consuming and using open and freely accessible resources.
Highly supportive of the rights to housing, food and work; inspired by speculative student projects which begin as abstractions only to later undergo real testing; relentlessly commited to reviving a different urban culture – the specifically organized and structured culture of the Sweet&Salt project.
