Artist Statement (2021)
Throughout my body of work, I am interested in the discourse around socially-engaged practices. While I navigate the overlap between art and architecture, spatial design remains front and center in my practice. The tendency to ‘include the other’ is evidently informed by my practice of architecture, as it embraces scenarios that think of how a space can be best designed to accommodate its inhabitants. Next to that, I work with conversation as a medium, text, drawing, and photography while borrowing the tools of performative research.
Being part of independent programs of art education and pedagogical spaces pushed me to define, reshape, articulate, and situate my practice while still maintaining creative exploration. That allowed me to later on experiment with designing and hosting formats that invite non-artists and artists to produce knowledge about the connection between artists and their immediate context. This opened up a lot of questions about the organization of spaces for art practice, research and education. My work explores different modes of participation, factors that impact social gatherings and their capacity for collective knowledge-making, and how to allow for conversations to unfold. Through looking into said spatial typologies, I try to rethink existing models of meeting, while playing around with scenography, seating arrangements and venues of meeting.
My work aspires to design situations and to plan experiences that perform social dreaming and actions. I consider myself to be someone who is dependant on working with others, leaning towards collaborative processes whenever I can.
My early works explored ways of how conversations that happen through casual encounters can create a physical space or an image of one. Then, I shifted positions to explore the capacity of space to let conversations unravel. The work, therefore, continues to foster an interest in the tension between spaces and conversations, and how one can lead to the creation and shaping of the other.