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Schillig develops new set of textile structures 'Public Receptors'

31 Mar '09
2 min read

Van Alen Institute is pleased to announce Public Receptors: Beneath the Skin, a textile installation by New York Prize Fellow Gabi Schillig, a conceptual artist and architect based in Berlin.

Schillig's wearable spatial structures mediate between private users and public spaces, provoking new relationships between bodies, clothing and the built environment. Redefining the garment as tactile architecture, Schillig explores the potential for soft geometries and surfaces of textiles, conventionally associated with individual bodies and human scale, to generate alternative arrangements of social space and modes of interaction in the urban fabric.

For Schillig, multiple users, desires, and urban contexts are necessary to materialize her work. Designed to be interconnected and shared, her second skins evolve an architecture built upon the creativity of its participants.

Over the course of her fellowship residency, Schillig has developed a new set of textile structures she calls public receptors, and she has conducted a series of site-specific experiments for their implementation in New York City. Made from felt, latex, and a variety of fastening devices, the structures are designed for attachment to specific building surfaces and street conditions, to be improvised and appropriated for clothing, furniture, habitat, or other uses. Upon contact, they transform in geometry, texture, and color from two-dimensional and often camouflaged elements in the city to three-dimensional interfaces that sensitize and reassociate urban bodies to environments at multiple scales.

Public Receptors:
Beneath the Skin assembles Schillig's textile structures in Van Alen Institute's gallery for staged and spontaneous performance, interaction, and play. They are presented alongside footage of Schillig's experiments in the city, with documentation of her research processes and material investigations.

This program is free and open to the public by Tuesday, March 31.

Opening Reception:
- Thursday, April 2, 6:30 p.m. at Van Alen Institute.
- On view through April 17, 2009.

Van Alen Institute is an independent nonprofit architectural organization whose mission is to promote inquiry into the processes that shape the design of the public realm.

Van Alen Institute

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