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My work aims to create temporary situations by developing material interfaces that establish subversive - and often absurd - relationships between the body and its environment. My ongoing research is exploring the re-appropriation of the physical by using material strategies as a cultural technique, negotiating the boundaries between bodies, the non-constructed and the constructed. It is geometry that is used as a vehicle of imagination and it is the physical towards the structural that is of specific interest here - form is apprehended as elements enter into physical action. The structures wait for activation and are simply meant to be held, worn, to be laid in or stood under, used by one, two or more people, creating strange moments of social intimacy. Processes are dependent on structure, while the work folds open and back upon a series of situations, provoking a constant re-organization of the object-subject-environment relation.

My work is questioning a static production, control and state of space by investigating geometrical organization and textile materiality, mapping social relations of and in space, merging insights from architecture, art, textiles and body performance. Individuals are required to participate, eliminating both the role of the spectator and that of the author. It engages art and architecture through the medium of the tactile, focusing the spatial quality of architecture on the personal nature of the body and on physical interaction with space.

Performative and participatory strategies for spatial production generate a changing, multi-dimensional understanding of architecture and space. In this context it becomes evident that the concept of the architect needs to be expanded to an initiator of space who provides a system that is open to changes. Architecture becomes a public statement in which notions of the body, collective living spaces and temporary or mobile shelters produce ideas about personal boundaries as well as on an urban/human scale, and where the second skin becomes an envelope for self-expression and an extension of the body.

The limit of a person is not the outermost layer of skin. Therefore, these spatial structures de-limit the surroundings of the body, marking out a territory in the public urban fabric that allows a person to reappropriate the notion of living and where architecture is brought back into the realm of the everyday.

gabi schillig