IT SEEMS ALMOST inevitable that the most disruptive art experiment in Brussels wound up on Rue du Marteau — or Hammer Street, as it might be called in English. At the beginning of 2022, the French visual artist Salomé Sperling, 25, then in her fourth year at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, discovered a listing for a 5,000-square-foot, six-bedroom townhouse about 90 minutes from campus by car that came with a 600-square-foot atelier. Sperling and four fellow schoolmates — Jaime le Bleu, 27, Ale Mangindaan, 24, Line Murken, 28, and Sijmen Vellekoop, 26 — decided to create a studio of their own in the house, located in the city’s densely populated Saint-Josse-ten-Noode neighborhood. The fact that the building was derelict and covered in at least a decade of grime, with patchy electricity and no heat, only made them like it more.
That winter, the five students (Mangindaan has since relocated to Berlin) got to work renovating the four-story property, which was built during the second half of the 19th century as a private home and later used as an office. It took three months to make the place habitable; in the dead of winter, they all slept in one room to conserve body heat. But often they’d just toil through the night, making furniture and other objects to fill the rooms. It was an opportunity not just to create work but to test it on themselves. “At school, you don’t learn how these things are actually being applied,” Vellekoop says.
A month after moving in, Espace Aygo — a nod to le Bleu’s beloved Toyota Aygo, which they use to transport discarded tables and chairs, odd scraps of metal and other salvaged materials back to their headquarters — was formed. “We had a rule in the beginning that you don’t go out of the house without bringing something back,” says Murken. The artist collective describes its style as “a patchwork,” the result of their own collagelike approaches to creating furniture, as well as the contributions of other artists who stay as part of an informal residency program. Except for the kitchen utensils, almost everything has been made by them.
From the foyer, a long multicolor corridor leads to a central staircase and the studio behind it. To the right of the hallway, in a salon with a ceiling fresco of a female nude by the artist Klaartje van Essen and Rothkoesque walls in shades of clementine and cobalt blue, the building’s original stained-glass windows and marble fireplace have been preserved (although the mantel is now covered in stainless steel). Through an archway lined with plaster casts of their friends’ breasts, there’s a snug alcove known as the Grotto, which has papier-mâché walls made from copies of a novel that they discovered in the basement. With its bright green splatter-shaped rug and a sofa made by Sperling from a tangled nest of misshapen blue cushions atop welded metal rods, the room has an elemental, almost grotesque feel.
In the basement, the kitchen evokes what the group jokingly calls “the industrial revolution of Hobbits.” A tentacular hammered-steel light fixture hanging above the metal-and-cardboard pulp dining table made by le Bleu has magnetic ends for storing cutlery. The group eats off colorful glazed clay plates made to resemble a totem sculpture when stacked. (That way, even a pile of dirty dishes can look good.) On the third floor, Sperling and le Bleu, who are a couple, share a giant butterfly-shaped, stainless-steel bed that they made together. On the top floor, in Murken’s bedroom, walls constructed from insulation foam and plaster-covered papier-mâché conjure a fleshy cocoon. Vellekoop’s room, a work in progress, is just a temporary wooden bed frame and a mattress.
IN APRIL 2022, the residents of Espace Aygo began hosting cultural events. The following November, they organized a life drawing class that was so well attended it turned into a wild party. “It was out of control,” says Murken. “Afterward, it felt like the whole space had been a little abused,” adds Vellekoop somberly. A week later, while Sperling and Murken were in the atelier completing a private commission — a human-size steel cage covered in polyurethane foam — a spark from a heat gun set the highly flammable materials alight. Murken and Sperling were rescued by the fire department, and they all spent the night next door, where Sperling’s best friend from childhood happens to live, but when they returned the next morning, thieves had stolen their tools and computers.
The destruction prompted a reset — and deepened their bond. “It’s so easy to be good with each other when things are good,” says Vellekoop. “But when things are bad, it’s important to know that you can rely on one another.” In a therapeutic act, they built a chaise longue and upholstered it in the fireproof curtains that survived the blaze. “We have this idea that the house told us to chill out,” says Sperling. “We’d lost track of what we were doing here.”
They also recommitted to finishing what they started: making vases for the hallway out of repurposed wood from an ax-throwing bar; tackling the bathroom where they often congregate — sometimes all of them at once — in the shower. Murken wanted the new tub, which is coated in urethane rubber that softens in hot water, to evoke the feeling of being inside a womb. The shower and sink are made from fiberglass and pigmented polyester, and a pétanque ball has been repurposed into a faucet.
When their lease ends in December, the building will be gutted. And yet the group is optimistic: The plan is to sell the furniture and begin again. “You can put us anywhere and we can apply what we’ve learned,” says le Bleu. “We’re literally creating a world that makes us happy,” adds Sperling. “We want to explore that even more.”
Production: Misha Kahn
The post A Derelict Townhouse Becomes a D.I.Y. Wonderland appeared first on New York Times.
