Researcher Ersi Varveri on her project:
For the last two years my practice has aligned with the activities I co-organise in the pink house, a self-organised artist-run space situated in the north of Antwerp. I moved there together with my colleague and partner Gijs Waterschoot to live and to continue activities in this space and sustain the artistic dynamics of this house.
To have a starting point to develop my approach, I started looking at both my position as hosts/artist as well as the physical space of this house, putting forward the notion of hospitality. How, what, where and when is hospitality? What does that mean in relation to a house that combines very different functions, and also oscillates in between public and private space? How do I relate with my peers that we share the space? How to find a common ground together, despite our differences in approach and needs? How to reach an audience, develop a public? How does this affect my artistic practice, both the individual as well as the collective?
Approaching the house as testing ground for a diversity of experiments, with ‘becoming a space’ I want to set the foundation for dialogues and actions based on current issues like structural models of self-organisation, (self-)sustainability, and subject matters as (artistic) authorship, collectivity as well as collaborative practices.
Becoming a space also aims to explore further the dynamic of (self-)publishing by initiating a periodical edition: a dynamic archive documenting and sharing the research. Self-publishing is an exceptional tool for an adaptive practice of (self-)reflection and creative archiving.
