COALITION 1: Coalition of Collectives with Espace Aygo, the Floating Museum, and Raumlabor

The first COALITION will discuss the work of three collective practices: Espace Aygo, The Floating Museum with Faheem Majeed, and Raumlabor with Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius.

With interventions by Mireia Luzzárraga and Joseph Zeal-Henry.

Espace Aygo is a collective of four artists and designers: Sijmen Vellekoop, Line Murken, Jaime Le Bleu, and Salome Sperling. Marteau is their first experiment. It is a house, a workshop, a stage, and a manifesto at once. In this space, they live among the things they have made. From the spoon to the sofa, from the staircase to the smallest vessel, each object has been created by hand, guided by the conviction that design is ontological. To make is to shape matter, but also to shape existence itself- rituals, relationships, and ways of being in the world.

At Marteau, they practice total design: an environment where furniture, tools, architecture, and gestures of daily life are inseparable. The house breathes process, trial and error, invention born of necessity and imagination.

But Espace Aygo Marteau is not theirs alone. It is a space of hospitality and exchange, where the works of fellow artists and designers enter into dialogue with their own. Together, they cultivate a shifting ecosystem of practices, each piece a fragment of a larger conversation about how we might live differently, more consciously, more playfully, more beautifully.

Benjamin Foerster-Baldenius is a performing architect and member of the collective raumlaborberlin. Its 9 membres are wildering in many artistic fields to generate new, contemporary and sustainable concepts of urban praxis. With raumlabor he founded the floating university berlin, that won the golden lion on the venice architecture biennial 2023. He teaches in varying roles urban intervention, transdisciplinary design and he was until recently the first professor of cohabitation and vice rector at the frankfurt university of arts.

Faheem Majeed is an artist, curator, educator, and non-profit administrator whose practice centers collaboration and institutional critique to engage communities in meaningful dialogue. He received his BFA from Howard University and MFA from the University of Illinois Chicago, where he is now Assistant Professor of Art. Majeed is Co-Director and Founder of Floating Museum, a Chicago-based arts collective reimagining relationships between art, community, and public institutions. His work has been exhibited at the MCA Chicago, Centre Pompidou, The Highline, and Hyde Park Art Center, and he is a recipient of major awards including the Joyce Foundation and Joan Mitchell Foundation.