Louiza is a curatorial-, research- and production structure active in the broad field of the arts, expanding into spatial practice, activism and research, founded by Els Silvrants-Barclay in 2009.
Els Silvrants-Barclay is a curator, researcher and activist. As senior researcher at the Chair of Affective Architectures in the Department of Architecture at ETH Zürich, she initiated and co-coördinates the Dept. of the Ongoing. She is associate researcher at the Brussels Centre for Urban Studies and coordinator of Permanent, a practice-based research project that draws upon anti-speculative models from the commons- and cooperative economy to develop an infrastructure for a multitude of uses and users to ‘be in it together without needing to be the same’. As a curator, she often works with artists on commissions in public space and she has developed a training on this for the Platform Kunst in Opdracht. Her practice is centred on the politics of spatial production, looking at space as affective, as choreography of bodies, as reflective and reproductive of worldviews, and assembles around the question on how to think and produce space otherwise.
Since 2020, Louiza also supports the work of the artist Sarah Smolders. Sarah Smolders handles the conditions in which space is created and experienced. To her, these conditions are both material and immaterial, and depart from the gaze and the body of the viewer that moves around in this space – including herself. Sarah Smolders uses painting as a language to set up a dialogue with specific places. By means of site-specific actions and gestures, walking the line between matter, architecture and painterly representations, she explores how time, movement, past and memory can express themselves spatially.
Louiza BV / Finstraat 15B 1080 Sint-Jans-Molenbeek, Brussels, Belgium
Say hello@louiza.org / VAT BE 0810.461.031