ADS0: Rooms and Windows – Framing the Everyday Catastrophe in a City of Interiors

This year our studio explored catastrophe, a framework fraught with conflict but also aspiration. Commonly  used to denote disaster or calamity,  the  words’ Greek origin katastrophē implies a denouement, overturning, or the resolution of a plot. In the context of the everyday, catastrophe encompasses events leading to unexpected shifts, a force denaturalising the most mundane aspects overlooked by repetition, routine, or mere tedium. ADS0's 2020-2021 program confronts our current circumstances focusing our spatial practices inwards, towards the interior, through specific devices, the room and the window. Whereas the room is activated as a pictorial stage, the window is put forward as an intermediary optical device which not only links the interior with the world outside but above all metaphorically links architecture with photography, film, and art practice.

We engaged this year in a particular use of both analogue  and  digital  representational  techniques,  positioning  the  image  and  its  construction process  at  the  centre of  our approach  that is based on  research  by  practice  through experimentation.  ADSO  is  run  as  an  artist  collective. Individual  students  are  guided  to develop their own unique practice through the year.  As  a  result, the studio is constituted by a diverse  body  of  work,  offering  a  multitude  of  unique  perspectives on our theme, that help us challenge  our  prevailing  value-systems  and  in  doing  so,  present  us with  an  opportunity  to  face  change  in  a  more  radical and joyful way.

Steve Salembier & Maria Páez González

With special thanks to:

Melanie Deboutte, Louis-Phillipe Van Eeckhoutte, Kelly Spanou, Benny Vandendriessche, Brendon Carlin, and Andrew Houston.