Silvia Brandi
Watch the livestreamSilvia opens with the path that led here: two decades in Barcelona at the frontier of digital fabrication, at IAAC and Fab Lab Barcelona, robotic construction, and directing the Fixing the Future festival. The turning question was simple: why not start applying these ideas in real life?
FarmLab is a creative living lab in rural Styria, Austria, at the intersection of traditional craft, digital fabrication, and sustainable agriculture. It is four things at once: a fab lab (a node of the global Fab Lab Network), a semi-self-sufficient small farm with a heritage orchard and a flock of sheep, a rural creative hub open to local and international communities, and a living testbed for how we make, produce and live together.
The mission: revitalise rural contexts as places of encounter, exchange and diversity, connect inherited knowledge with contemporary technologies and local resources, and explore circular, regenerative ways of producing and living. The labs span digital fabrication, ceramics, wool and textiles, woodworking, and a bio-corner of natural dyes and biomaterials. In 2026 FarmLab won first prize in the crafts category of the Styrian Vulkanland Innovation Award.
A small rural place, plugged into the world. FarmLab is a node between scales, an active member of the Fab Lab Network (over 3,000 labs worldwide, instigated by MIT, sharing one inventory and the Fab Academy), alongside Vulca (European makerspaces), the European Creative Hubs Network, and CRAB, the Creative Rural Hubs community. Her question runs both ways: how can a network become a place, and a place become a network?
Networks let ideas, knowledge and experience travel and take new forms somewhere else. Silvia's MitMachRäume project brings the model home: a local network of makerspaces across a rural area of 30,000 people in southeast Styria, connected by a digital platform, so tools, knowledge and a wider international community come within reach of the neighbourhood.
Agency is the capacity to act: not only access to resources, but to the tools, knowledge, relationships and confidence needed to do something with them. It is the question that drives the whole project: how can a rural community today build the agency to make, learn and act, in a sustainable way?
The talk closes on 'one year at the FarmLab', where making follows the seasons: winter is slow making (baskets, wood, forge), spring brings the shearers and the wool cycle from spinning to felting, summer is colours and ceramics with natural dyes, raku and 3D-printed clay, and autumn readies for the cold. The principle underneath: knowledge can travel, materials remain situated, and shared knowledge increases the capacity of situated communities to act.