Every Island:
Maintenance as an act of care
Off the Grid
Periode: 01.10.2022—22.01.2023
Every Island is a Brussels based design collective founded in 2021. They investigates the concept of performativity in space through architecture and ephemeral installations. Using the notion of ambiguity as a design tool, they see space as a scenography of transitions, roles, scenes and meanings. In each project, the materiality is conceived as a reminiscence of hidden images and sensations. The collective was founded by Alessandro Cugola, Caterina Malavolti, Damir Draganic, Martina Genovesi, Juliane Seehawer.
Every Island:
Maintenance as an act of care
The project Maintenance as an act of care finds its roots within and around a house which was never finished, or never meant to be. Doors remained open towards the sky, walls bare and naked.
One might read the house as an artificial ruin: it stands as a fake temple in a British garden.
An ambiguous object that shows the beauty of the archetype that has never found its use. As remained interrupted, it becomes an hypothesis rather than a memory.
In this interruption we see the potential for multiple appropriations, actions of care, of interpretation and understanding.
There is no solution to be found or answer to aim to. Every intervention brings the assumption of a radical change that leads instead into a process of exasperation of an antitheses, the head-on clash of positions, the accentuation of contradictions.
Driven by the opportunity that the site offers, for three months every island will become the maintenance team of the house: setting an atelier, they will cyclically enter the white space to attempt ‘the complete’ via incompleteness.
The cyclical negotiation of the ruin will remain open: those actions will attempt each time a different use, and by doing so they will also alter the maintenance team, that will constantly perform a different role: architect, designer, inhabitants, strangers, passengers, etc.
