Roxana A Caplan

A GATHERING SPACE IN WOODS is taking root for the Ouseburn Festival 🌿 and this is your invitation to take part! Shaped by many hands. Built from waste and grown materials. Guided by care, creativity, and community. We’re co-creating a temporary woodland pavilion in the Ouseburn Valley: a space for gathering, making, sharing, and connecting. More than the structure itself, this project is about the process: coming together to imagine and build a space that weaves together our skills, knowledge and shared care for our environment. We are so excited for what's to come: • hands-on making with natural + reclaimed materials • skill-sharing with makers, doers, and local groups • collective creativity + experimentation • connection to each other and the land • a playful, meaningful challenge 🌱 Are you a local community group already tending to the area? We would love to hear your voice, knowledge, and experience. Let’s collaborate and shape this together. 🤔 Are you an individual looking for a way to get involved in something local and creative? Want to expand your environmental impact or learn new skills? Or just fancy getting stuck into something fun, collaborative, and outdoors? Let’s explore how spaces are made in community through shared knowledge, care for the environment, and collective empowerment. DM us @commonc.co or get in touch to join, collaborate, or learn more 🌿 @ouseburnfest @ouseburntrust #CommunityBuild #RegenerativeDesign #CreativeCollaboration #CollaborativeMaking EnvironmentalAction VolunteerOpportunity

What if the spaces we gather in were shaped by us? Something is beginning to take shape as we move toward the Ouseburn Festival this year 🌿 We are building something together: Pavilion of the Commons 🤝 with a series of open, community-led skill-sharing moments. Together, we’ll create a small, temporary pavilion in the Ouseburn Valley’s woodland: a shared space for gathering, workshops, and connection during the festival. Rooted in hands-on making with natural materials, this is a chance to explore how we relate to one another, and to the surroundings we’re part of, holding care for both people and multi-species communities. How? We’ll find out together. This is all about the process, and less about the outcome. 🌱 💡We’re gathering a collective of doers, makers, and curious minds. 🔨 If you’d like to be part of it, find the form in our bio or send us a DM for more details. #communitybuilding @ouseburnfest @ouseburntrust #naturalmaterials #communitycare #naturearchitecture #volunteercallout

ever felt the power of coming together? to share, to create, to connect? come along to our collective gatherings and experience it for yourself 🌱🫶 (background photos from our recent terrarium tiny ecosystem workshop) #communionwithnature #communitycare #collectivelycreate #newcastleupontyne #rootedincommunity

you might have heard that craft is at the core of what we do: At Common C, we are focusing on connection and skill-sharing to build collective resilience and empower people to find their agency to protect and care for one another, the spaces we live in and beyond. Through this movement, we can discover our own approach alongside shared values and collective action. This is not about returning to old ways, but celebrating them, as they are part of our identity. We have always sought connection, it is just that, nowadays, we have become so deprived of it. The good news is that it has not been taken away, it has just been hidden from sight, suppressed, ambushed by a world of technological commodity that deep down distracted us from our core identity - that we are in communion with one another already, we're just acting as if we're not. Craft speaks of this communion, hence why it is at the core of our approach, a way of gently coming back to feeling what is there already. Craft brings ourselves, others, living beings, the land we stand on and are surrounded by, the spaces we have created and the innate objects that we made, all in attuned awareness. Not in a rushed way, not in an intellectual way, but in an embodied, often unspoken, yet meaningful way. So join us as we explore the magic of coming together to craft, to connect and to nurture common care. #communionwithnature #collectiveaction #digitalrevolution #ecologicalcrisis #authenticconnections

may we move through this month slowly, bringing care and attention to ourselves and what surrounds us with this intention, we invite you to join the collective act of pausing and taking notice notice the common [pause] - [notice] - [record] - [share] let's bring awareness to what is right next to us near us, above our heads, under our feet and all around us this is not a challenge, this is not something to feel pressure about this is a gentle invitation to approach things with curiosity, like searching for a treasure and finding it right there, in plain sight. take care 🌿 #noticethecommon #nature #collectivecare #connection #journaling

i've not done a year recap before, but this year, i felt called to reflect and share a little about it. it's less about outward achievements, but rather the inner tensions and eventual insights. recaping my year has helped me put things in perspective, about where I was, and what I thought I was after, about how things evolved, about the breakthroughs that have blessed me with acceptance and more trust. the biggest lesson, above everything, was that it is all about my attitude towards challenge and learning about what truly holds one through uncertainty: trust and patience. so although a whirlwind, it has been an incredible journey that i am grateful for and happy to continue on. take care!

Is this a rant? A cry? What am I even saying? I m not posting this for reach and views I think maybe this is why I can't bring myself to post my thoughts on here so easily Because that's not what I'm after. So allow me use this as my declaration to myself Firstly and most importantly I intend to use this space for self-expression And for self-accountancy. <3

I did not expect to leave so inspired from this workshop that I facilitated not participated in! What an amazing time to bring young minds together to think of the big and the small picture on ways to bring care into our designs! Not just care for the human users but care for the more-than-human species surrounding our buildings: the birds, the pollinators, the small mammals and more. What if this ecological way of thinking might actually help us shape a more caring, just and regenerative future for ourselves, our communities and for the rest of nature we are (and always been) entangled with? Would you like to take on a challenge and collaboratively design alternatives? Get in touch! #ecologicaldesign #regenerativearchitecture #regenerativeliving

A story behind my motivations, the way I think and feel about the world, myself and what surrounds me. This may have been the very period that has deeply shaped me and that has opened my mind and heart towards a view and attitude that I may carry with me from then on. #climateresilience #biodiversitymatters #climatecollapse

Are you looking for connection? For like-minded people in the North East? If you've been searching for creative social activities that feel meaningful, this collective is for you. ✨ You don't need to stay disconnected. Let's get together and celebrate our connection to nature and one another. 🤝 Are you excited? More details soon - stay connected! 🌿 #newcastleupontyneuk #newcastlecommunity #natureconnection #connectwithcommunity #craftivism #communitybuilding #naturecrafting

we started with a dream and with the help of everyone: dedicated and passionate curator team, amazing speakers and facilitators, our sponsors and collaborators our warm venue and the brilliant catering team, as well as all of you, engaged participants, who have come from close and far across the UK and Ireland, the festival was brought to its entangled life! We hope you have enjoyed it! We are grateful for everyone's involvement and we hope this has taught us all, or reminded us, the deep power or collective determination and action! Thank you for your time, efforts and engagement! Stay entagled! @joebass26 @m.exhibit @caplan.arch @aliza.kabani @elliott @sophiedavies2 @lauriemilne_1 @studiio_az @poppydoddarch @anaapetrarchini_ @owen scott.mcaulay @beyondourroots_ skifascotland @civichouse_ @annakerr12 @hannah_gray1243 @architectscan @uwtsd @mackintosh.school.architecture @glasgowtoollibrary @resourcetwelve @blanche.cameron @newfuture_constructionschool @fuelpovertyaction @haanisaalih @stucan_architectscan and many more!

a place i might always remember, where nature was woven in the architecture and the cracks between it, where creativity meets community, and spaces were created to include and invite, where pieces are reclaimed and repurposed and spaces emerge in the corners of others, with a central space formed to move people into the light and bring together nature, craft and culture in sight. in this place that showed me how nature can be crafted in and woven caringly within, i paused... like the elements that seemed suspended in time, like the floating window reflecting the sky. each corner had another corner, with each space holding a portal into another: like the tucked-away craft workshop, and the alley leading up, down and under, each view had a story, or a hundred; each element, a past life or a few more. the layers of each view are still to be discovered, as I look back now, or later on, new memories form, on top, on the side and at an angle, like the very spaces that once were before me, you and one another. #architecture #ecologicaldesign #ecoarchitecture #natureliving