Swap Space is a pilot project at KUG Graz that focuses on novel forms of collaborative artistic research in which otherness, difference and distance between the participants are central and are brought into a cohesive form via the concept of the spatial. Selected questions and previously sketched procedures are an important part of Swap Space and will be tested for their validity and feasibility in a time-limited experiment among six artists-researchers as a proof-of-concept. Thus, on the one hand, the pilot project provides important data and preliminary results, sets the course and ensures that the future project design is viable. On the other hand, Swap Space takes up new decisive impulses for thought - such as the concept of contact - the elaboration of which aims to determine the form of a multi-year research project.

Nayarí Castillo is a Molecular Biologist and Artist (MFA Public Art and New Artistic Strategies, Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar, DE). Specialized in Public Art her interventions engage with history, time and space, with especial emphasis in experiments in perception and engagement. She has won multiple prizes and bursaries including the Bursary for the Arts of the city of Graz (AT) and the CIFO prize 2014, Miami (USA) . She has worked as coordinator of international projects ― Stories from the Edge (storiesfromtheedge.net) and more recently ―Inverting Battlefields (inclusiveeurope.net). She has worked as lecturer and invited professor in several universities, especially at the Iinstitute of Contemporary Art at TUGraz, at the moment she works as University Researcher at the Institute of Spatial Design.

Nayarí’s space

{2022-01-13}

I have been thinking about collaboration, paralleling (tangential) working, and coexistence. How do interactions work on those different routes? There are many grades of contamination among participants, tho it is coexistence the one that really demands constant exchange.

some texts are contructed from ramifications, they derive and divert, they grow as a tree, whose branches never touch...other texts, as usually mine, are round, the get to a place just to return to the base. {nc 220125}

I am not in the mood for writing, I am overwhelmed with the digital readiness of collaboration...tired of having constant digital debts {nc 220125}

{nc 040322}

It is time for me to describe my space, that other half (bottom) that I share with hanns in the Morellenfeldgasse 11, our lovely storefront, which allows me to be in-between, and is that liminality is a big part of my focus, so those spaces where I see without been seeing or someone can observe me without me feeling it, are some of my most beloved spaces. So in this threshold, I produce my work. Full of books, a book press, a silkscreen table, a guillotine, and boxes of different working elements, the space is also filled with small little things: dried flowers, strange seeds, biological samples in jars, desiccated mushrooms, and other sui generis materials that are fundamental in the creation of some of my installations. As well as glass, glass containers, especially scientific instruments populate the space.

I love this space because it reminds me of little storefronts in the Netherlands or Scandinavia — off-white soundly wood everywhere.

I have been thinking of changing the lamp, usually, my chaos keeps me from hearing that trembling sound, but now is very present. It is strange, but silence has become my writing space.

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Nayarí’s space