• Johanna Irander (April 30)
• Natascha Seideneck (May 4)
• Karolin Schwab (May 5)
• Andre Dekker (May 22)
• Ryan Dewey (May 28)

Org.: Miguel Costa & Fringes, Landscape Observatory | This event was developed in collaboration between the MA Art and Design for the Public Space and the course unit Atelier I (Department of Sculpture, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Porto, Portugal).

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Lines of Descent by Ryan Dewey: The Great Lakes region had already been covered with 600 meters of glacial clay when the remains of the Laurentide Ice Sheet made a final retreat and melted into a puddle that amounts to 21% of the world’s available fresh water. It’s a flat region, with some of the only exposed rock faces peeking out along the shorelines of the lakes and on the limestone islands that dot the edges of the lakes. Some of these islands have glacial grooves that were carved as the ice sheet carried granite boulders south from Canada into the northern United States.

I’ve been visiting these grooves since childhood, and once while lying in the groove I imagined the weight of the glacier pushing down on granite to carve these flutes into the limestone. I began to empathize with the glacier and felt I needed to try to replicate the motion at human scale to better understand the process. This led to the construction of a glacial hand tool, a block of ice with three granite stones frozen in place which I grind back and forth on a slab of limestone to scribe a line until the ice melts and the hand tool falls apart. I’ve performed this work at several sites of glacial significance in the northern United States.

One of those sites is the driftless region, an isolated spot where the Laurentide Ice Sheet did not scour the landscape. While I was exploring the area I came across a historic rural cemetery. I began to think about what this cemetery would look like if a glacier moved across the field in the future, grabbing tombstones and carrying them like boulders to grind away the ground. I made my first model landscape that day with wooden tombstones, slabs of clay, and field measurements taken with knots on a ball of string.

Around that same time, it became apparent to me that the repetitive back and forth motion of the hand held glacial tool was reminiscent of using a carpenter’s hand plane. So I began to think about the types of blades and styles of hand planes that are found in a carpenter’s workshop. While on residency in a tiny mountain village in Switzerland, I met a carpenter who taught me the names of the different hand planes he used and I started to think more about the way that combinations of different hand planes could produce the complex grooving patterns of decorative architectural moulding which is made in both wood and plaster. And further, I began to explore how hand planes could combine to produce moldings with sections that matched the contours of glacial grooves.

When a glacier picks up a granite boulder it pushes that boulder through the ground which wears away both the substrate and the cutting tool. The variation in the groove patterns reflects the variation in cutting materials and the rate of consumption of the granite boulders since mass is lost during transport. This presents an opportunity for landscape design. At the scale of landscape, it should be possible to place stones in a particular sequence and allow a glacier to grab those stones and carve a somewhat predictable pattern based on the array and sequence of the stones. These “implements for future glacial scouring” are one of the ways that I collaborate with geologic forces of the next ice age. As part of my speculative practice I place latent objects in various sites and abandon them to the deep future.

At some point I made the connection that cemeteries already prime landscapes for future glacial scouring in a highly formalized way. The arrays of granite memorial stones provide a ready field of cutting tools for the next ice age (if it ever comes).

As a species, our first tools were made of stone and we thrived because of this lithic technological advancement, so it is ironic that our contemporary tools, modes of production, and manufacturing processes have accelerated our move toward extinction as a species. We cannot deny that we are at the mercy of climate change and the planet is sweating us out in a hot fever.

In the deep past, glaciers moved granite boulders across the ground, scouring and marking the terrain before depositing these boulders erratically in the landscape. These glacial erratics dot the landscape and stand as markers of past geologic activity, similar to the way we use granite tombstones to mark the past activity of a human life. But for the glacier, granite erratics are much more than mere markers; these stones are also the mark makers, the very tool used by a glacier to shape the landscape in the process of moving the stone.

As I contextualized these thoughts with my glacial hand tool and the clay model of the cemetery, I wondered if these thoughts about glacial erratics could be adapted to our conception of tombstones as latent objects with terraforming potential. Tombstones are potential mark making tools for glaciers in the deep future, and by framing it this way, tombstones can be seen as our final stone tools, bookmarking the lifespan of our species.

Looking at the arrays of tombstones in cemetery fields, we should be able to predict what future landscape patterns might be left behind by our tombstone-erratics after the next ice age (should the planet be so lucky). The slow advancing and retreating motion of a glacier grinds grooves into bedrock much like the use of a carpenter’s hand plane to flatten and flute details in wood. For Lines of Descent, I took this idea and iterated to develop of a series of progressively complex hand planes with strange granite blades fashioned in the shape of common tombstone profiles and I used them to produce a series of landscape models to help visualize a future terrain that will be formed by the memorial stones we leave behind. The tombstone markers of familial lines meet the iterative lines of drift in the developmental process of tool-making to predict what new lines our memorials will leave in the landscape after the descent of humanity in the deep future.

Exhibition Information:
Ryan Dewey’s solo exhibition Lines of Descent was generously supported by an emergency grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts and presented at The Sculpture Center (Cleveland Ohio) from 25 January to 15 March, 2019.

Ryan Dewey‘s work is a kind of ecological dreaming that takes shape as installation, performance, research, workshops, and land art to highlight the entanglements between people, places, and land use. He has been a resident at ACRE (Chicago), the Alps Art Academy (Switzerland), and the Montello Foundation (Nevada), as well as a visiting researcher in the department of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland) where he wrote the open access book Hack the Experience: New Tools for Artists from Cognitive Science (Punctum Books, 2018). He operates across disciplines, seeking holism through art, anthropology, business, psychology, and the geosciences to unpack the interconnectedness of people, places, and planetary change. Besides traditional galleries, his work often pops up in unexpected venues including the British Society for Geomorphology, the American Association of Geographers, Kickstarter, the University of Bern, Concordia University (Montreal), the Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative, the Annenberg School for Communication (Philadelphia), Progressive Insurance (Cleveland), SLA (Copenhagen), KERB (Melbourne), MONU (Rotterdam), and others.

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The great thing about going to artist residencies is that you end up in places you never thought you would go to. That’s how I got to Tenna — a tiny village in the middle of the Swiss Alps 1600m above sea level. I mention that, because I was born and raised by the sea and nothing is really higher than 10 meters (in fact, everything that is higher than 10 meters it is already considered to be a mountain). The first morning I woke up in Tenna and walked outside I found myself and the whole village covered in clouds. I remember how I couldn’t help but think, how I have never been this close to the clouds before and how much I would love to touch them. This is usually how the creative process starts for me. First there is a feeling, then there is a language. Later that day I sat down, looked at the clouds disappearing in the distance and I said: I want to catch a cloud.

© Images by Karolin Schwab, except image 3 by Felix Contzen.
Year: 2018 | Dimensions: 320 x 270 x 25 cm | Medium: gloss paint on wood

Karolin Schwab (b. 1987) is visual artist based between London and Berlin. Using site specific installation and sculpture she explores different ideas of how we perceive a landscape as well as the space and the relationship between the viewer and their ever-changing environment. Her works embrace the gentle processes and movements in everything, while also seeking to find a moment of stillness, that connects inner and outer landscape. After studying Fine Art at the University of East London (2013) and the University of Arts Berlin (2016) she participated in manifold international exhibitions and residencies in China, Switzerland, USA amongst others. In 2019 she received the Gilbert Bayes Award and became a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors. Currently she is nominated for the Broomhill National Sculpture Prize 2019 and soon will go on to a 4 month residency in Denmark as recipient of the MALT AIR scholarship.

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This conversation took place in September 2018, following Toni Gironès’ lecture at the AAICO — Architecture and Art’18 International Congress, in Porto.

In your public presentations, it is possible to perceive many of your concerns, not only about the different contexts where you have been working but also about the natural processes that affect the human occupation over the territory. It is not so usual to find these concerns related to the project of a single building — it is more usual to see them related to landscape projects.

In your presentations it’s also interesting the way you move between scales — the territory and the climate; the different places; the different programs; the budget; the materials and the details — also starting with the image of our planet. These are also related to bigger subjects such as the current environmental conditions, climate change, public engagement, etc. It seems more close to an architecture of causes, than the usual architecture discourse, more centered on the design concept, program or form.

How do you see the practice of architecture related to these different scales and global important subjects?

During the lecture in Porto, there was one important word — habitability. And, from there, the experience of architecture. If we change the word ‘architecture’ for ‘habitability’, we will open the mind because this simple word may make us think about what is our job, or for what we are working for, or for whom we are working for. In this case, I think that in the idea of what is contemporary architecture, there is a central misrepresentation about what we produce in the end. And I say we as a collective. If you look to architecture from the concept of habitability, it will be possible to understand architecture as something that works the relationships between people and the site, people and the place or people and the environment. Thus, architecture as habitability is something that intermediates. And, something that acts as intermediation, always need to know what happens on both sides of the boundary or situation, trying that different parts relate between them in harmony — leading to the habitability of humans. In Planet Earth as a territory, there is a complexity of questions that involves different scales and different frameworks. But, if you work with this concept, by connecting sensibility and scientific accuracy, and combining all these parts during the project design process, in the end, the things will materialize as something natural.

Actually, what happens is that a big percentage of architects in the world, and also in the academies, think that architecture is to make buildings and cities. In this case, I think that my job as an architect is to work the habitability in the Planet Earth.

For me, there are no absolute programs. I can work with buildings as in Badalona or Salou social housing as well as other different programs. You begin working and relating local specificities, the resources that you have, different spatial dimensions, polyvalent requirements, etc., and all these things that you referred before such as landscape, program, materials, detail and so on are all connected in harmony as different parts and dimensions of the working process. In the end, you will produce your own program.

When you transform all the questions that the clients make you, through this framework, that is the concept of habitability.

The concept of habitability is also connected with us as biological species and the biological support that is the Planet Earth. However, the continuous human changes and transformations have led to the need to review our relationship with our own planet.

Despite the use of the term “landscape” in the architecture practice, I prefer to talk about the Earth system, the natural cycles, or nature’s elements, which are also related to the practice of agriculture, because maybe, at the end we need this support.

And for me, in my short life related to the time length of the human species, I prefer to work in this direction and to try to modify some assumptions as much as I can. I’m trying to communicate this strong connection between humans, which are in harmony with all that we have around us, the Earth, the Universe, etc., and I’m trying to use the architecture as an element that I can work as an instrument with it. Not only as an architect but also as a person.

But sometimes people are not entirely aware of these subjects…

When people have time to relate and enjoy the place, there’s no need to explain nothing, or to explain theories. Each one has its own experience of the site, the experience of their life, the experience of their habitability.

However, the experience of the Modern Movement in architecture is still present in the mind of the architects when they are designing. This is a strong image that architecture students and architects have in their unconscious. For example, the white box with long windows and stilt pavilions that arrive at the site as an absolute element, using abstract concepts from modernist art movements. I think that is interesting as a design process, but if, at the end of the process you want to express the habitability of the site and the people, you need to return to the origin, because this abstraction needs to be real in the end. I think that there are a lot of architects that design as an abstraction and build the site as an abstraction, not completing all the process.

In your works over archeological sites, there is, not only a great concern with the layers related to the history of the site but also with the mediation between building and landscape.  Everything seems to be very balanced. They do not compete with each other. The importance of history doesn’t overlap the landscape and vice-versa. They merge through the used materials, and these materials also tell new stories (such as the process of rusting) through the way they react and transform over time, the same way the landscape does.

Can you talk more about these approaches and material decisions?

Material decisions are part of the process. I think that the proximity of the materials is important. The contemporary society understands time as something in an eternal present, fighting with the real-time — the time that is in movement. But if you work with the porosity in materials, if you work without constraints related to the aesthetic images that all society has in their conscience, maybe you can understand that when you are building habitability, it is also the passage of time that is contributing to building that habitability. You don’t need to fight with time or how time is passing, during the years or through the processes in the site.

Thus, the wood, the iron, the stone, all the materials will change. The porosity in these materials is in direct relation with time and harmony will appear through the passage of time, as a natural process.

So, this is important in the experience of architecture. By experiencing with all the senses (e.g. smell, touch, hearing), many aesthetic prejudices and questions may become less relevant. People may like (or not) the places at first sight, but they might feel good after experiencing it.

And this is when harmony happens. Then, you can fight with the prejudices that people have as a society. For me, it’s essential to understand that time builds its own habitability and builds architecture and that we don’t need to fight it. For that, it’s just essential to understand the material condition and the passage of time.

Time and experience are also very present in your projects in archeological sites like Seró, which also need to be experienced through time. The public is slowly directed through several environments (corridors, exhibition rooms, and the surrounding landscape). It is not a direct experience and doesn’t seem to be a touristic walk that will be forgotten some minutes later. Do you think that this experience, which takes time to be completed, can remain more attached to the peoples’ memories?

Yes. If people go to these places, as in the case of Seró, an agricultural place, they go there to have a specific experience. Thus, all the work around memory, all the transitions between the different experiences, is part of my work. Is part of my work to give them these transitions: different atmospheres, different insights between interior and exterior. And then, who interprets, who has the experience, is the people that go there. But you need to work with the conditions that permit to offer this experience and this continuity – this will be the material from which these people build their memories and experiences.

In the case of Seró, when we did the bathroom of the building, I said to the client that I didn’t want to put mirrors. I preferred people to recognize who they are at that precise moment, and how they are changing during that frame of time while having this experience. These spaces should make you recognize your experience, your memory, and who you are without needing to recognize yourself as an image in one mirror.

The society is changing, is fighting between the biological life span and trans-human and post-human possibilities. And we need to work in balance with all the options that we have.

But I think there are important foundations as humans. Biological ones. For me, uncertainty about life and death it’s not so important. I think that we are part of one process and the doubt is an important part of our progress.

The questions and not the answers are the most important. If you design by working with the questions, working with the doubts, and working with the uncertainty, you will progress more.

Another interesting subject is related to how some of your works can be related to some art approaches and experiments. This has been done by creating singular situations and experiences or by using temporary strategies of public engagement and activation. For example, the Passanelles installation, the La Pedrera installation, or even the walls in Seró, made with white wine bottles from where you can take off the cork or remove the bottle as a thermal and cross ventilation system. These are very simple gestures, but also very performative ones.

As an architect, how do you manage these porosities between temporary and permanent, between art references and architectural practice?

I think that architecture works with different concepts. I think that science is important as an objective knowledge; philosophy as a concept; and art as perception. And I think that sometimes, directly or not, we work with artistic concepts.

During the process of raising questions, we may arrive at different results through different paths, and maybe art arrives from one of those different paths too.

If you work with material leftovers as a generator of places (with the materials that people normally don’t use more), they may be reused or recycle as a way to preserve a memory or to create new conditions and situations. The same way there are artists for whom the material and the passage of time provides something that is interesting to reuse as another concept. In the end, for me, there is never a direct reference. The attitude may be similar to art processes, yet intersected with a scientific approach.

I’m more interested in recognizing the conditions of the place and its different scales, which are directly related to habitability. Whether living conditions or geological processes.

If you have this capacity, if you are conscious that this exists, you can register it, and then, when crossing it with the needs that people have through the creation of the program, then you can activate these elements with the action of the design. As the doctor — if a doctor makes a good diagnostic about what happens in your body, he will make major improvements in your health. This is the analogy between health and habitability, and between medicine and architecture. I think that in architecture, during these last decades, people always loved to make strong surgical interventions, modifying all the site, doing a big building. I think that we need to review the relationship between the public and the site in which we live. The recognition and activation of the pre-existing must be a central approach in architecture.

One last question: this is related to the deciduous climbers that are very present in your work, maybe more than trees. To a certain extent, they act like temporary installations, between its visibility (constructing the summer shadow) and its absence (constructing the winter sun).

Usually the vegetation is implemented almost at the end of the project but, in your case, you are adding and using these climbers like any other building material, which will have the ability to transform or to evolve over time, like the iron that will rust or bend over time shaping the form of a pergola (such as in Seró).

Can you talk about the use of plants (and the climbers) in your work?

Yes. Not only the climbers but all the vegetation in general. For me, it’s an architectural material. In the pergola of Seró, we have the effect of the gravity, but the grid made by the Parthenocissus quinquefolia mixed with the iron is building something. It is building a roof and it is building an important change in temperature. This is the most important because when we were designing this pergola, it was not the design of one pergola. It was the design of one shadow. This was the real exercise.

The shadow is in direct relation with the habitability. If the material was steel, you would know that you would have a higher temperature under the shadow than outside; if the material was opaque glass, you would have the greenhouse effect… even worst, etc. etc. In the end, you would understand that the best material between the sun in summer, when you most need the shadow, is the vegetation. And it’s also a smart material because it’s a deciduous plant and changes. In winter, when you need the sunlight, the leaves disappear.

Constructing the sunlight by its absence…

Yes, but not as an aesthetic approach as you have seen during these past years, with glass skyscrapers and vegetation being used as an image. However, the skyscraper is made with glass, and you need an artificial climate to make it warm or cool. In the end, is just an appealing image. Like all these vertical garden facades with artificial robotic systems and pumps, when you know that these plants grow naturally with soil, water and you don’t need to create all these artificial processes.

I also use a lot of pre-existing trees in the site as important main shadows, whether through deciduous or evergreen trees.

And, although in Salou social housing you can see the presence of climbers in the building, you also have an area of 10 meters where I’ve planted a forest of deciduous trees. And then, the main wind of Salou (Mistral) arise from this direction, will cross this area of 10 meters of trees, it will cool down, and after cooling down, it will cross the apartments through the windows.

I think that to understand the trees and vegetation as an architectural material is another subject that maybe, in the architecture schools, is not so present. The tree is always something that is being used as a decoration of the site.

And, in the public space it’s normal to organize trees in rows, but without paying attention to people. During my presentations, I usually show images where we can see one bench with a tree placed in the north side. But there are also examples of trees placed in the south part, but at a distance of one meter from the bench, when the shadow has five meters.

You place the bench not thinking with the shadow, but just thinking with the object-tree. In the end, there is no habitability. It’s the same when you have a bench made of steel where it’s impossible to seat during in the summer because it will be burning hot.

Some projects are being produced as an image to be photographed because people read architecture across one screen or a publication, but the habitability concept disappears.

Sometimes, I feel that in the end, there’s no theory. Just paying attention, knowing how to observe, learning more and more day by day. This is one process and not an absolute idea, or an absolute image, or an absolute program.

© Images by Aitor Estevez Olaizola (images 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 9) and Toni Gironès.

Estudi D’arquitectura Toni Gironès

The post The landscapes in Toni Gironès’s architecture appeared first on Fringes.

The project is surrounded by an open, gentle meadow valley and wooded, steep forest slopes in a characteristic way. The aim of the design is to highlight precisely this contrast. The spa park (“Kurpark”) is centrally located and includes direct access to a lake. It is surrounded by flat, blooming meadowlands featuring a barefoot trail and a beekeeper’s hive. In contrast to the wide meadows, the forest park (“Waldpark”) functions as its “introvert counterpoint”.
The highlight of the forest park is the „therapeutic walking loop“. Thirteen stations are associated with human moods such as clarity, overview, openness, harmony, confusion, attentiveness, contemplation, transparency and sublimity. A landscape window (“Landschaftsfenster”) serves as a prelude to the loop. A steel grotto bridge (“Grottensteg”) leads visitors past mystical caves and rock formations. Accompanied by the “fairy sounds” of an audio installation (“Feenklang”), the loop leads to five stances featuring a signature red paint finish. The view becomes even more impressive: a former ski jump was transformed into a spectacular viewpoint including a swing. Passing a vitalizing re-naturalized spring, visitors reach the path-spider (“Wegespinne”). This is a place for resting or contemplating the loop’s many twists and turns. The loop continues through a dense forest, past a red shimmering fairy wreath (“Feenkranz”) and a poet’s clearing (“Dichterlichtung”), perfect for deep thought and reflection. Comfortable hammocks invite visitors to rest their tired legs at the end of an inspiring hike.

© All images by Claudia Dreyße

Planergruppe Oberhausen: We design free and open spaces by making space perceptible and usable. We draw the attention to the existing qualities of (city) landscapes.
Our office was founded in Oberhausen (Germany) in 1973, and since the end of 2018 we are based in Essen and Hannover. Our focus is landscape architecture and we are active in all related contemporary topics. Our range of services extends from large-scale concepts to the planning of neighbourhoods or district parks.
Our main office in the Ruhr area is located in the midst of an industry and settlement area, which allows us a detailed view on potentials and issues of the Ruhr-Emscher region. Moreover, it raises awareness for projects in other domains and areas.
Working in the domain of designing industrial landscapes has shaped our work as these spaces have an unconventionally fascinating beauty which wants to be perceived and preserved. The appreciation of the existing is the principle of our work: we discern the patterns of the existing and use architectural elements and materials with restraint yet consciously, and always with respect to the space. Whenever we intervene with our work, we do so in a retained and dedicated manner.
We are a team of long-time, experienced and young landscape architects and architects. We develop draft designs in a group and together with those who move in these free and open spaces, as through different areas and domains of experience, the perspective broadens and the concept becomes more multifaceted. In many of our projects we work interdisciplinary with traffic planners, urban planners and architects, landscape architects, ecologists, as well as artists.
With the completion of the projects our work is not fully finished as it is our concern to continue to further accompany these by developing concepts for value-preserving maintenance, calculating lifecycle costs and planning the long-term maintenance management.
Potential influences of climate change, a change in mobility behaviour, and the preservation of biodiversity challenge open spaces. We consider and include these factors and plan accordingly to make free and open spaces available not only today but also in the future.

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Pin(k) A Place is a project that operates on the surface of the forest, overlapping the existing landscape without deleting or modifying it substantially. It is a project, which strives to be reversible; impermanent but at the same time trying to provoke reactions. By introducing icons to the landscape and engaging the visitors physically and emotionally, it tries to choreograph a relationship between the visitors and the forest. Thereby, the visitors of the forest become co-authors and an integrative part of this investigative research project. The intention behind this interactive research of people’s perception of the landscape is to understand and document what, where and why people feel most attached to. Doing so the project opens a conversation with the visitor, stimulates their conscious examination of their environment as well as active participation. It locates the individual findings and builds a collectively authored archive of perceptions. By doing so we are trying to improve the understanding of perception of the landscape, searching for the sense of the forest.

On site: The first assignment given when visitors come to site, is to go into the forest and to use a bamboo stick with a pink top to “pin the place where the forest gives you the strongest feeling”. In order to find this place, visitors are stimulated to use all their senses activating further exploration of the landscape.

The second item the visitors take with them into the forest is a pinhole camera. They get the assignment to use it to take a photo on the spot where they pinned the stick. With the assignment the visitors are told that the photo they take is supposed to represent the source of their strongest feeling; the element in the landscape that made them choose this spot as the place where they had the strongest feeling. It could be a photo of a detail or of an overview but a selfie representing a memory was also an option. The fact that we ask the visitors to take a photo forces them to look around but also to look inside. Within this lies the connection between the space of the forest to the visitors inside. It is the step that makes the forest not just a space, but also a place. The analogue way of taking a photo makes it so the visitors only get one chance to take the photo. This makes the action a very conscious one and activates the visitors to really look, feel and then choose.

In order to know what visitors feel we give them a notepaper. The notepaper is completely empty except for the word ‘notes’ and a square for the pinhole photo. This way, the visitors are free to write or draw whatever they want to, giving them the opportunity to elaborate and to share. Bringing the visitors from looking outside to the forest (finding the spot), to inside themselves (feeling a feeling), to outside of the forest (taking the picture) and back inside themselves (describing what they felt). This creates an interplay between the personal space and the environment, the visitors and the landscape.

As the installation also holds an aspect of research, we have to locate the sticks so we can relate the notepapers with their feeling and stories to the respective place to make conclusions about the space. To do that, we layed out a grid over the forest. This grid consists out of white crosses on the ground representing grid points. A cross has four corners, each standing for one quadrant of the grid. So when the visitors pin the stick, take the photo, write down their notes, they are asked to find the closest cross and write down the number that stands for the according quadrant. This simple gives us a reference we can use for the documentation.

After the experience inside the forest, the first step is to hand in the pinhole camera so the picture can be developed. During the development, the visitors are asked to think back to what they felt in the forest and choose a category from the emotion wheel. This emotion wheel has 6 categories of emotions or feelings in which ‘all’ feelings can be divided. The visitors are asked to choose the color of the feeling category, that best matches their strongest feeling in the forest.

In the meantime, the picture is developed and hung from a line on the dark room. The moment has arrived when the visitors can see how their photo came out. Recognizing or discovering what the photo shows is part of the magic of the archive. Since the photos do not come out like the photos from your phone would, a level of attention is required to really dive into what it exactly shows. But the important thing is that it generates the feeling of involvement as opposed to detachment. However, how taking the photo was a moment of curiosity and tension, the receiving of the photo is a moment of unraveling, of reflection. This moment is used to close the chapter of your own feelings and to open up to the others.

The next step is to stick the photo to the notepaper and place this paper on the according table in the archive. The tables are shaped and positioned to be a scaled version of the grid in the forest. The tables all have a number each representing a quadrant in the forest. According to this, the visitor knows on which table to place their notepaper. Leaving the paper behind in the archive is just like letting go of the stick and thereby your feeling. Now the notepaper with its personal story is not just yours anymore, it is part of the installation for others to discover. It can bring some sort of a realization that every person is different beyond imagination and that every perception of the same landscape is not the same. These are interesting lessons we, but also visitors take home from Pin(k) a Place.

The archive shows where the strongest feelings accumulate. It shows the ratio of which areas were popular and which ones were not. You could call this a live infographic mental mind map. The tables with the fatter books mean more sticks so more ‘strongest’ feelings. The installation gives the visitors a direct feedback of their contribution to the installation and part of its results.

© All images by Pin(k) A Place team

Pin(k) A Place team: We are Bella Bluemink, Eva Ventura, Eva Willemsen, Federica Sanchez, Ge Hong, Ilya Tasioula, Jan Gerk de Boer, Joey Liang, Lukas Kropp, Maël Vanhelsuwé, Maximilian Einert, Michelle Siemerink, Qingyun Lin, Timothy Radhitya Djagiri, Yao Lu. During this project we were Master students in the fields of Landscape Architecture, Architecture and Urban Design at TU Delft and we represent 6 different countries. Advised by our tutors Denise Piccinini and Rene van der Velde we are the brains behind this project.

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The viewer is presented with an interpretation of a water feature, with rocky islands and bare trees. If the viewer allows himself to be receptive and open to the illusion, similar to when looking at a landscape painting, the indisputably fictional outdoor space becomes a true experience.

The light gray landscape is sober and tranquil, it invites the viewer to stare at the depths and disappear into a moment of reflection, introspection, such as one might experience when staring at the sea, or a mountain valley. It is no coincidence that this work, which stands exactly where previously the abbey church once was, has a spiritual dimension. The artist conceived this silent space as a place for meditation, entirely in line with the original purpose of an abbey.

Following the installation of ‘Location (5)’ in the Towada Art Center in Japan, this is Op de Beeck’s second monumental perception-oriented artwork to be given a permanent home.

Location: Herkenrode, Hasselt, BE

© All images by Hans Op de Beeck

Hans Op de Beeck produces large installations, sculptures, films, drawings, paintings, photographs and texts. His work is a reflection on our complex society and the universal questions of meaning and mortality that resonate within it. He regards man as a being who stages the world around him in a tragi-comic way. Above all, Op de Beeck is keen to stimulate the viewers’ senses, and invite them to really experience the image. He seeks to create a form of visual fiction that delivers a moment of wonder and silence.

Over the past twenty years Op de Beeck realized numerous monumental ‘sensorial’ installations, in which he evoked what he describes as ‘visual fictions’: tactile deserted spaces as an empty set for the viewer to walk through or sit down in, sculpted havens for introspection. In many of his films though, in contrast with those depopulated spaces, he prominently depicts anonymous characters.

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© All images by Natascha Seideneck

Natascha Seideneck was born in Germany, grew up in England and lives in Denver, Colorado. Her work is interdisciplinary; often engaging in experimental processes that integrate still and time-based visual technologies. She is particularly interested in how landscape has been surveyed and surveilled, both in contemporary and historical contexts. Natascha has widely exhibited her artwork and produced numerous site – specific artworks, often collaborating with artists, designers and architects. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Art at Metro State University of Denver and a member of Tank Studios.

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In religious cosmology, the sky was conceptualized as a physical structure – a firmament – that separated earth from the oceans of heavens. Firmament Arch references the architecture of our increasingly necessary biodomes and greenhouses and reimagines them as the firmament structures of tomorrow. The curved backbone of the work houses a network of tanks, tubes, pumps, and nozzles that form an aeroponic growing environment, allowing plants to grow in irregular and confined spaces with minimal water waste or reliance on natural light.

© Images from Eric Rannestad
Completed with the Clowes Fund Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center. April 2019.

Eric Rannestad (b. 1996, Connecticut) is a Washington based artist making work about the built environment and the systems humans use to compartmentalize the natural world. Eric received his BA in Art and Economics from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. He has attended fellowships and residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, North Cascades Institute, New York Arts Practicum, and Shell House Residency. His research in environmental economics is critical to his art practice and Eric’s ongoing work for environmental and conservation groups is a strong influence in his work.

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© All images by Atelier Cristina Ataíde

The project was carried out under the POLDRA Public Sculpture Project Viseu, which has as its creator and promoter the visual artist João Dias.
Year: 2018
Place: Mata do Fontelo, Viseu, Portugal | 40.6580970. – 7.9015820
Media: Tether strap, paint and metal
Dimensions: 1.300 m (variable; the full length of the tether strap)

Cristina Ataíde is a visual artist. She lives and works in Lisbon. She is Graduate in Sculpture and has a Master’s degree in Sculpture, by the Superior School of Fine Arts of the Lisbon University, where she also attended the course of Design Studies. She was an Invited Teacher at Lusofona University, in Lisbon between 1997 and 2012.
Her work, most of the time is done during the artist’s travelling, transits between sculpture and drawing, going through photography and video.
The concerns about nature are one of the most constant worries in her work. Going through different landscapes and around the world, trying to understand its questions. The denounce of ecological crimes, the preservation of nature, and in her last years, the problematics about the refugees, are always going around her personal and artistic preoccupations. The migration problematic, for instance, it is possible to see in her NO NAME installations, present at the travelling exhibition in Rome, Madrid, France, Brno, and this year will be at Biennale Baku, Azerbaijan.
Cristina Ataíde has enrolled in different artist residencies, for example Ethiopia Walkscapes, Hangar Residence, 2017; Winter Workspace Program, Glyndor Gallery Wave Hill, NYC, USA, 2014; Verflixt und Zugenauht, Wittenberge, Germany, 2014, etc…
Her work is represented in different public and private collections in Portugal and abroad.

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