ADS0: Umwelt – The Environment as a Pictorial Stage in Constant States of Change

At the centre of this year's studio zero is the biologist Jakob Von Uexküll’s 1907 theory of the “Umwelt''. This theory stipulates that every living organism actively creates a unique and self-centred “image”, or “model”, of the world it inhabits. This image comprises a partial, incomplete, and subjective representation of reality. As the Umwelt constitutes reality as it is perceived by an individual living organism, it is both undetachable from that organism and autobiographical in every sense. ADS0 explores this concept as a spatial category in order to challenge our notions of architecture and space, and to generate new representational possibilities using multiple combinations of audiovisual, scenographic, linguistic, and performative media. We first explored the concept of the Umwelt by considering the more tangible concept of the “environment” by referring to installation and performance art from the 1960s. The environment was activated as a pictorial stage, a coherent spatial system that communicates a partial and subjective view of the world through the establishment of its own codes and protocols of experience. Through the conception of these environments, ADS0 engaged with the narrative and discursive capacities of architectural space in relation to art, photography, film, installation, scenography, and performance. Our studio is organised as an artist collective that focuses on individual research by practice, transdisciplinary experimentation, and operations in architectural, artistic, and performative fields of work.

Tutors: Steve Salembier and María Páez González

Art Seminars: Louis-Philippe Van Eeckhoutte

Rendering Tutorials: Maceij Kanarkowski

We would like to thank: Ibaye Camp, Brendon Carlin, Jingru (Cyan) Cheng, Rachel Cronin, Fabio Cervi, Ruth Lang, Thandi Loewenson, Lesley Lokko, Ben Mehigan, Nicolas John Ng, Dubravka Sekulic and Ines Weizman