Allium van der Linden

* De oorspronkelijke Engelse versie van deze tekst is wegens artistieke overwegingen behouden.

As a contextual designer, my work often comes from a desire to make ecological awareness embodied. Something to understand, and something to notice, feel and move with. Within this desire, I keep returning to the relationships between bodies and the environments they inhabit, its sensorial effects which can be harnessed and shaped; reconfigured to allow one to be more in tune with all that is happening around them. 

In this day and age, people seem increasingly separated from their surroundings. Many modern spaces are designed around speed, efficiency and circulation. We pass through corridors, lobbies, waiting areas and thresholds without being asked to notice where we are, who we are near, or what we are part of. This creates a disconnect between bodies and environments, in which connection becomes brief, unnoticed or suddenly interrupted.

Within What makes space convivial? I question how space can become a brief harborer of convivial encounters. I looked at conviviality as a temporary alignment between the self, the community and the ecosystem: a moment in which bodies, spaces and environments sensorially coincide.

Using water as a metaphor and method, the project explores how space can gather, reflect, refract, respond, and then disperse. Through blurring, merging and overlapping bodies, light, surfaces and environments, points of convivial collection are sought out: moments where encounter briefly becomes felt or visible.

The work takes form through a visual essay, scores and methods, video studies and speculative spatial interventions. Non-places are used as case studies to test how even spaces of passage can momentarily invite attunement.

Ultimately, the project proposes that space becomes convivial when it allows us to notice ourselves as part of a larger field.

Allium van der Linden