A temporary pavilion will occupy The Spit — a small public green between a new housing development and a council waste disposal centre on the south bank of the Thames. Responding to this year’s theme Belonging, the pavilion approaches belonging not only as a social condition but also as a material practice. Conceived as a processing station, it holds discarded objects in a moment of suspension: between attachment and release, prompting reflection on how meanings, materials and urban life become entangled, and how the things we keep, use, and discard shape our experiences of place and community.

A weeklong programme of processions, talks, workshops, performances, screenings and participatory activities transform the pavilion into a temporary site for unexpected encounters and collective exploration of belonging/s as something constantly in motion and negotiated through material practices and flows.

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Day 1:

14:00 – 15:00: Threshold Architecture - The Pavilion as a Method
Jaspar Joseph-Lester in conversation with Gihan Karunaratne, opening the weekend of events, this conversation explores The Pavilion of Transient Belonging/s as a form of threshold architecture within the city’s material flows — an intermediate spatial condition between use and discard, value and excess, ownership and abandonment. Situated on The Spit, a small public space between a housing development and Wandsworth’s waste disposal centre, the pavilion operates as a space of suspension in which discarded belongings are temporarily held before entering systems of disposal. Drawing on ideas of liminal urbanism, Jaspar and Gihan will explore how temporary structures can interrupt established urban logics and create provisional spaces in which value, attention, care, belonging and belongings might be collectively reconsidered.

15:00 – 16:00: Re:Telling Objects - Workshop with Ute Heuer. What stories do objects carry, and what happens when they are placed somewhere they do not quite belong? Open to anyone with curiosity and an open mind, participants are invited to bring a small personal item and reposition it within The Pavilion landscape through drawing and photography. Through observation, imagination and acts of re-framing, familiar objects are shifted into new contexts, exploring how belongings carry memory, identity and attachment.

16:00 – 17:00: Identity Flows - Talk & workshop with Josie Kane, Sarah Cheang & Zhengyuan Dai. Connecting with the theme of local and global community, Identity Flows will use water as a way of exploring history and the fluid cultural identities of migration and belonging in London. How have the many lived experiences of the city been connected by the rivers that flowed through and under it, and how are these linked to events around the globe? What material traces will we leave behind? Thinking about discarded or votive objects and water, and drawing on the metaphors of fluids, tides and liquidity, suggests new ways to understand matters of cultural belonging, colonialism and the life (and death) experiences immigration and settlement.

17:00 – 19:00: Guess Who? Guess What? The Pavilion Quiz, hosted by Antonia Low & Josie Kane. Part-guesswork, part-analysis, this creative quiz invites participants to put their art-detective hats on and investigate selected objects from the pavilion display. Who might this have belonged to, and what might it have been used for? Inspired by the pub quiz format, this activity uses speculative fabulation to construct the secret life of discarded items.