Spatial Investigations: Why Architecture Matters

A conversation between Gabriela Löffel and Aisling Rusk.

We have invited Gabriela Löffel, a Swiss artist whose multi-channel video installation “Inside” explores the concept of art freeports. She will show excerpts of her work and discuss her approach and strategies to exploring investigative themes through art.

The experiences she made on the construction site of a new art freeport in Shanghai, together with the position of the Geneva art freeport the first art freeport ever and which takes the function of a model are the focus of her work “Inside”.

The inaccessibility and non-transparency that operate in these financial tools, in form of buildings – Art Freeports, constitute the starting point of “Inside”.

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Aisling Rusk is a practising architect and researcher who explores spatial practice in contested space. ‘It was Churchill who said that we shape our buildings and then afterwards, our buildings shape us. Conflicts and wars have a physical impact on our built environment that often far outlasts the civil unrest.  In Belfast, for example, 24 years after the Good Friday Agreement there are still 100 peace walls that are not proving easy to remove, because people still think they are necessary.  Aisling will explore how conflict shapes the built environment in more and less obvious ways, through the example of Belfast, and will set out some examples of ‘liminal spatial praxis’ in Northern Ireland – practices that are, in various ways, transgressions that erode physical divisions between people and places.