bet88 A Derelict Townhouse Becomes a D.I.Y. Wonderland
IT SEEMS ALMOST inevitable that the most disruptive art experiment in Brussels wound up on Rue du Marteau — or Hammer Street, as it might be called in English. At the beginning of 2022, the French visual artist Salomé Sperling, 25, then in her fourth year at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, discovered a listing for a 5,000-square-footbet88, six-bedroom townhouse about 90 minutes from campus by car that came with a 600-square-foot atelier. Sperling and four fellow schoolmates — Jaime le Bleu, 27, Ale Mangindaan, 24, Line Murken, 28, and Sijmen Vellekoop, 26 — decided to create a studio of their own in the house, located in the city’s densely populated Saint-Josse-ten-Noode neighborhood. The fact that the building was derelict and covered in at least a decade of grime, with patchy electricity and no heat, only made them like it more.
Videotranscript
House Tour | Espace AygoThe artist-roommates show off their shared Brussels townhouse where they made virtually everything, including a sink fixture from a pétanque ball and a tub from urethane rubber.I’m Sijmen. My name is Jaime. Hey, I’m Salomé. I’m Line. Welcome to Espace Aygo! We are an artist collective, conducting a domestic experiment by building and creating our environment and living in it. I’m sitting on the couch that I would have loved to play with as a kid. It’s inspired by the surroundings I grew up in. I’m from Marseilles. In here, I love to stare into the fresque that is showing beautiful curves of the body. Welcome to our room. We made a circus. So after producing the bed, we had this leftover material. And out of that, we made a chandelier piece. This is a piece that I like to get lost into. This window frame is an extension of a dream where this pattern appeared. I made this bath to return back to the womb. Everything in here is big, because we like to do things together. While making the kitchen, we thought that we were hobbits from the Industrial Revolution. We made those plates so that dirty dishes can become sculptures. Bye! Ciao!
The artist-roommates show off their shared Brussels townhouse where they made virtually everything, including a sink fixture from a pétanque ball and a tub from urethane rubber.CreditCredit...MimesisThat winter, the five students (Mangindaan has since relocated to Berlin) got to work renovating the four-story property, which was built during the second half of the 19th century as a private home and later used as an office. It took three months to make the place habitable; in the dead of winter, they all slept in one room to conserve body heat. But often they’d just toil through the night, making furniture and other objects to fill the rooms. It was an opportunity not just to create work but to test it on themselves. “At school, you don’t learn how these things are actually being applied,” Vellekoop says.
ImageIn the kitchen, also designed and made by the members of the collective, a tree trunk-shaped island sculpted from natural fibers, Jesmonite and plastic waste.Credit...Philippe BraquenierImageIn the bathroom, a resin-and-fiberglass sink atop a stainless-steel cabinet by Sperling, a cast-rubber bathtub by Murken and mirrors by le Bleu.Credit...Philippe BraquenierA month after moving in, Espace Aygo — a nod to le Bleu’s beloved Toyota Aygo, which they use to transport discarded tables and chairs, odd scraps of metal and other salvaged materials back to their headquarters — was formed. “We had a rule in the beginning that you don’t go out of the house without bringing something back,” says Murken. The artist collective describes its style as “a patchwork,” the result of their own collagelike approaches to creating furniture, as well as the contributions of other artists who stay as part of an informal residency program. Except for the kitchen utensils, almost everything has been made by them.
ImageSperling and le Bleu designed and built virtually everything in the room they share, including a bed wrapped in strips of stainless steel; a hand-cut mattress with patchwork bedsheets; a pair of hemp fiber, oak and textile bedside lamps; and 12 paintings mounted to the ceiling.Credit...Philippe BraquenierImageA sculptural garbage can made from cardboard fibers, Jesmonite and pigments.Credit...Philippe BraquenierWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.
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