29.04.2023
Mind Expanders
w/ Zamp Kelp
From Saturday 29 April, Kunsthal Rotterdam will be presenting the exhibition Mind Expanders with some of the best-known projects by playful and provocative architecture collective Haus-Rucker-Co. On the occasion of the grand opening De Dépendance presents a public talk with Zamp Kelp, founding member of the group.
Haus-Rucker-Co’s radical practice in the late 1960s and 1970s encompassed the use of spectacular air-inflated environments, futuristic technological prosthetics, and dystopian urban interventions to provide their users with new, altered perspectives on their surroundings. Often intervening with existing built forms, their inflatable structures emerged from windows and materialized in parking lots, reanimating one’s perception of the city in unexpected ways.
In a 60-minute conversation between Zamp Kelp and architecture theorist Lara Schrijver we will present Haus-Rucker-Co’s larger body of work, and discuss its social significance and current relevance. With a ticket for the talk it is possible to visit the exhibition before and/or after the event.
On the exhibition
The exhibition Mind Expanders features a selection of works made between 1967 and 1972, a period during which the collective developed its most distinctive and innovative architectural projects. The exhibition includes works like Balloon for 2, a transparent PVC membrane inflated into a large air bubble, Environmental Transformers, and Mind Expander II, as well as films such as Yellow Heart, and Food City I, showing the construction of an edible urban scale model. The highlight of the exhibition will be the interactive, legendary installation Giant Billiard (1970), which will be shown in the Netherlands for the very first time.
More info
Participants
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Zamp Kelp
Zamp Kelp is an Austrian architect and artist, who, together with Laurids Ortner and Klaus Pinter, founded Haus-Rucker-Co in Vienna in 1967. Since 1987 he has maintained an independent architectural practice consisting of public art commissions and architectural designs such as the Neanderthal Museum for the Evolution of Mankind (1996) and the Kunsthalle Mainz (2007). He was a professor of architecture and design at the University of the Arts, Berlin for nearly twenty years.
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Lara Schrijver
Lara Schrijver is Professor in Architecture Theory at the University of Antwerp Faculty of Design Sciences. She is the author of Radical Games – a book on radical movements in architecture in the 1960s – and has published and lectured widely on twentieth-century architecture and its theories.