Os Espacialistas were born in a university campus. They have been making not just room inside the academic space, but creating an inclusive classroom. By placing their heart in the Lab of Architecture and Art (L.AR), they have created a home (= lar), thus an experimental space of freedom, literally dwelling on their p/references.
Throughout their existence, thousands of objects have been caught by this collective, displaced from their original context, played and displayed in order to set new space possibilities. The more they interact with theirs and other people’s p/references, the more referenced back they are and improve a common Relational Technology. The future of architecture is becoming – together.
Universities formally provide the highest ground of knowledge, Os Espacialistas under/stand it as infinite sidereal space. Thus, they constellate p/references through intuition and map the highest human-based formative wisdom. The future is already designed in this campus stellae.
Exhibition on Artist’s Book in Oporto, Casa das Artes: Presenting Diário do Espacialista. Os Espacialistas displace artistic and cultural codes, destabilizing them towards ruling them again for space’s best, in their infinite manifest-publication, inspired in the Portuguese Diário da República. The Diary of the Spacialist was established on a table, in order to encounter public’s correspondence, as other spacialist’s work tables and dispositives that have been created in L.AR.
Os Espacialistas’ spatial practices have led them to infinite creative partnerships, namely, the writer Gonçalo M. Tavares and the architects Aires Mateus. This architectural relational technology allows them to be in or outside a book; by practicing its contents as “The Phenomenology of Roundness”, a chapter from the book “The Poetics of Space”, in Aires Mateus’ House in Monsaraz; or, by placing around 1200 photographic sketches in the book “Atlas of The Body and The Imagination”.
Three-scale table at L.AR: hand, imagination and 1:1. Constellating Le Corbusier’s Plain Voisin with Viarco’s moulds from coloured pencils and concrete cylinders from testing Souto Moura’s House of Stories. From biopsy to bi-optic, from meat to a meeting table. Building solid meals with new and old school objects. Summing up: “Species of Spaces and Other Pieces” from George Perec on a L.AR table.
Workshop in Marquis of Pombal’s Palace. L.AR as an itinerant, experimental and becoming classroom. Making (class)room from childhood to neighbourhood; body performing infinite constructions with wooden cubes – developing constructive, ludic and artistic skills.
L.AR is also a (work)shop in a cultural neighbourhood. The Cultural Centre of Belem in Lisbon (Vittorio Gregotti’s project) has spacialist shop, with a specific space-time-table: The artist is always present, working in his or hers dialogic cabinet of curiosities. Inspired in Aby Warburg’s atlas of images “Mnemosyne Atlas”, Os Espacialistas’ photographic sketches aim for correspondence as postcards amongst “Species of Spaces and Other [geometric] Pieces”. The Atlas book is here spatialized.
