Living Equipment: Portable spaces

For one year already, the artistic languages of Michela Dal Brollo and Inés Ballesteros converge. Michela Dal Brollo and Inés Ballesteros create and demonstrate portable equipment as a set of transportable, practical and conceptual devices, which they name “Living Equipment”. Through the Living Equipment, they research how to generate temporary spaces that favour more heterogeneous and diverse forms of urbanism, in contrast to a tendency towards privatization and control in public space.

The tools they are developing aim to be potential catalysts of social situations that temporarily transgress or soften spatial and social boundaries. Within this research project, they want to develop a movable structure to be installed in liminal spaces of Antwerp. The design of the structure will be based on research on vernacular shelters. The new structure will temporarily work as a cultural shelter for meetings, observatory of spatial dynamics and as an “in situ studio”. In order to adapt and communicate with different spaces of Antwerp, the structure will be transportable and foldable, taking multiple forms. The activation of the structure will happen with neighbours, artists and students.

Inés Ballesteros

http://www.inesballesteros.space/

Inés Ballesteros is a visual artist whose work unfolds in different media. In her practice she researches how articulations of public space that tend to control and privatization are contested through temporary infiltrations or re-appropriations, looking at the tensions and negotiations that are inherent to collective processes and to public space.

Michela Dal Brollo

Michela Dal Brollo graduated with a MA from In-situ3 at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp in 2018. With her practice, she explores how to “collaborate” with the encountered spaces. Dal Brollo is interested in the intrusive capacity of artistic practices in pre-existing processes and in exploring how art can be used as mediums to observe, collect, interpret, reveal or trigger human and non-human relationships. She is interested in the notion of space in movement, which she often translates into performative installations and mobile sculptures, able to modify their shape according to the unexpected needs of the moment.