Dear Oda Projesi,
Thanks for your invitation to participate in your book project. In answering your question how we try to sustain ourselves and our practice we would like to write you about a very specific “job” we took on, one which influenced our art practice and life considerably. In the years we worked as individual artists (1996-2006) Ronny used to build big installations, using huge quantities of wood. Because we lived in a very small apartment at the time, we were constantly looking for a space to store the wood, which he had recuperated from his projects to use again in new pieces. So we often had to move back and forth this wood, from one exhibition or storage place to another. At the time we were always joking that with all the time and effort we put in our art and in moving around the wood, we could already have built our own house. And one day this is what we did. We did not start to build from scratch, but we bought a space inside a small Brussels warehouse. The empty space was sold as a loft, but in reality it was just an open, unlivable floor, with water running from the walls and through holes in the roof. No one had ever lived there, except for some squatters, and it was more a ruin than anything else. We had not been looking for something like a loft at all, but after a long search it seemed to be the space that best suited our demands. So we started on a year long job of turning this ruin into a functioning working&living unit. All Ronny's art work found a destination in the loft, not as individual pieces, but hidden as supporting structures for floors and walls. We cancelled all art projects and embarked on a one-year full-time life as workers, renovating the house. We were very disciplined, working 5 days a week, 8 hours a day. After coming home in our rented apartment we would cook ourselves a meal, watch TV and maybe go for a walk on Sundays. It was very unusual for us to live like this. In the beginning it was kind of nice, but soon it became physically very exhausting and mentally quite empty. That's when we started thinking about turning the whole thing around and engaged in a process that would redefine the whole enterprise as an art project. And that's how A.I.R came about. Short for artist-in-residence, A.I.R is an abbreviation we started to use after a first research phase into what loft-living was and where it came from. Apparently the letters A.I.R. were engraved on small placards, which artists in the sixties in New York had to put on the outside doors of their cheap appropriated “loft” spaces, so that in case of an emergency firefighters would know that there was actually someone living in the abandoned factory. When we thought about our loft as an art work, we did not want it to become some special installation, like for example what Kurt Schwitters had done with the Merzbau in his house. For us our place should look very “normal”. It was the so-called normality of domesticity that we were interested in. Although the whole project played with the idea of private and public space, we decided that our house would never be open for the public. As we saw that people experience architecture mainly through different media, like films, magazines and books, we started to create different mediated “extensions” to our house, as a way to give it a public appearance. Those extensions could take the form of an exhibition or a video, but also a lecture, a radio interview, a magazine or a name card. So since 2006 we have been collaborating on these extensions, always using the house as a mental starting point. After some time the project evolved into a platform for collaboration with other people. They could be artists and curators, but also people from all sorts of professions that relate to the house, like architects, urbanists, real estate agents, lawyers and so on. These exchanges can take place anywhere in the world. And yet at the same time through all these intense collaborations the loft has also become a place for enjoying real friendships, in short it has become as much a real home as a base from which we engage in our practice.
Kind regards,
Katleen Vermeir & Ronny Heiremans
A.I.R extension #18
Thanks for your invitation to participate in your book project. In answering your question how we try to sustain ourselves and our practice we would like to write you about a very specific “job” we took on, one which influenced our art practice and life considerably. In the years we worked as individual artists (1996-2006) Ronny used to build big installations, using huge quantities of wood. Because we lived in a very small apartment at the time, we were constantly looking for a space to store the wood, which he had recuperated from his projects to use again in new pieces. So we often had to move back and forth this wood, from one exhibition or storage place to another. At the time we were always joking that with all the time and effort we put in our art and in moving around the wood, we could already have built our own house. And one day this is what we did. We did not start to build from scratch, but we bought a space inside a small Brussels warehouse. The empty space was sold as a loft, but in reality it was just an open, unlivable floor, with water running from the walls and through holes in the roof. No one had ever lived there, except for some squatters, and it was more a ruin than anything else. We had not been looking for something like a loft at all, but after a long search it seemed to be the space that best suited our demands. So we started on a year long job of turning this ruin into a functioning working&living unit. All Ronny's art work found a destination in the loft, not as individual pieces, but hidden as supporting structures for floors and walls. We cancelled all art projects and embarked on a one-year full-time life as workers, renovating the house. We were very disciplined, working 5 days a week, 8 hours a day. After coming home in our rented apartment we would cook ourselves a meal, watch TV and maybe go for a walk on Sundays. It was very unusual for us to live like this. In the beginning it was kind of nice, but soon it became physically very exhausting and mentally quite empty. That's when we started thinking about turning the whole thing around and engaged in a process that would redefine the whole enterprise as an art project. And that's how A.I.R came about. Short for artist-in-residence, A.I.R is an abbreviation we started to use after a first research phase into what loft-living was and where it came from. Apparently the letters A.I.R. were engraved on small placards, which artists in the sixties in New York had to put on the outside doors of their cheap appropriated “loft” spaces, so that in case of an emergency firefighters would know that there was actually someone living in the abandoned factory. When we thought about our loft as an art work, we did not want it to become some special installation, like for example what Kurt Schwitters had done with the Merzbau in his house. For us our place should look very “normal”. It was the so-called normality of domesticity that we were interested in. Although the whole project played with the idea of private and public space, we decided that our house would never be open for the public. As we saw that people experience architecture mainly through different media, like films, magazines and books, we started to create different mediated “extensions” to our house, as a way to give it a public appearance. Those extensions could take the form of an exhibition or a video, but also a lecture, a radio interview, a magazine or a name card. So since 2006 we have been collaborating on these extensions, always using the house as a mental starting point. After some time the project evolved into a platform for collaboration with other people. They could be artists and curators, but also people from all sorts of professions that relate to the house, like architects, urbanists, real estate agents, lawyers and so on. These exchanges can take place anywhere in the world. And yet at the same time through all these intense collaborations the loft has also become a place for enjoying real friendships, in short it has become as much a real home as a base from which we engage in our practice.
Kind regards,
Katleen Vermeir & Ronny Heiremans
A.I.R extension #18
9.03.2010, Beijing
