This is the last semester of our six years of artistic research titled MATERIAL GESTURE. The research on material gesture wishes to shift the focus towards the processes of working with a material and its resulting gestures in order to define a specific expression and spatial formation of architecture.

Roland Barthes in his writings on the work of Cy Twombly, defines the term gesture as the surplus of an action. An action, he writes: “is transitive, it seeks only to provoke an object, a result.” Whereas the gesture is “the indeterminate and inexhaustible total of reasons, pulsions, indolences which surround the action with an ‘atmosphere’.”

In this last semester an artwork will be your departure point. We have selected 20 works with a strong material, gestural and ideological character, and each student will be assigned one of the artworks within this selection.

As opposed to the white cube approach where the exhibition space is made as neutral as possible, you will research the possibility of making an architecture that is dedicated and specifically built for the artwork. The ambition is to research the work through its material aspects, the gestures and ideas of the artist and to produce an architecture for that work that is as specific as the work itself.

Anne Holtrop