Battersea, Gorvy Lecture Theatre , 16 October 2015
RCA - Visual Cultures Lecture Series: ÅYR and Castillo/Corrales (Frieze Projects 2015)
Opening the Visual Cultures Lecture Series 2015/16 is AYR, an art collective based in London (formerly known as AIRBNB Pavilion) whose work focuses on contemporary forms of domesticity. Founded by Fabrizio Ballabio, Alessandro Bava, Luis Ortega Govela and Octave Perrault, the collective was first formed on the occasion of an exhibition during the opening days of the XIV Architecture Biennale in Venice, which took place in apartments rented on Airbnb. It changed its name to ÅYR in 2015 following legal pressure from the San Francisco/Ireland based company. ÅYR tackles the evolution of the contemporary home and its transformations from the fortress of the family to a commodity traded online with performances, site-specific installations, events and writing. Its work focuses on the relationship between objects and their environments, and the effects of the internet on the city.
Opening the Visual Cultures Lecture Series 2015/16 is AYR, an their large-scale interactive installation at Frieze London will tackle the question of the ‘Smart Home’, curating a collaboration between cutting edge interior design and technology companies. The Smart Home is the first victim of the colonization of real space by digital space and has swiftly come to occupy a central position in debates around Big Data and its impact on contemporary forms of life.
castillo/corrales
is a non-profit organization run on a volunteer basis by a group of artists, curators, writers and graphic designers. Since its inception in 2007, it has been conceived of as a self-sustainable project – a new type of art space in Paris that provides artists, professionals and audiences with an intimate and informal environment conducive to experimentation, discussion and learning. castillo/corrales founded the bookstore Section 7 Books, and the publishing house Paraguay Press to consider the “space” of the book as an extension of artistic, critical and curatorial thinking into a graphic, mobile, democratic and
durable form. castillo/corrales also operates as a curators’ collective and has organized exhibitions and events in Castillo/corrales’ project The Social Life of the Book is a collection of commissioned texts considering how books engage with the circulation of ideas and the agency of social situations. It brings together artists, publishers, writers, designers and booksellers who consider books less as finished objects than spaces of disruptive potential with the ability to produce new relationships, publics and meanings.
A series of performances will take place all afternoon with the Berlin Based performers and occasionally bar tenders called Bar Vulkan. A site specific bar will be built in the entrance hall of the lecture theatre.
