Precarious Pavilions unfolded in four phases over the years 2018 – 2019. In four different cities (Ghent, Brussels, Antwerp, Leuven), during four different seasons (summer, autumn, winter, spring), four different artists/collectives responded to the question:

How can we think about architecture —the creation of space— within an unstable world? How can the notion of precarity offer a lens through which to rethink our ways of living and the infrastructure we construct for it?

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Pavilion #0 — ring
Common room, together with Ward Heirwegh / Sleeperhold Publications, made a limited edition of 17 rings. These refer to an original design by common room for Dexter Sinister in New York. These 17 rings were given to a specific group of artists, writers, curators and architects who were asked to appropriate the ring on their turn. Vandevelde decided to make the ring part of the Precarious Pavilions project and he approaches it as a pavilion into a pavilion. The ring will, in one way or another, always be part of each new Precarious Pavilions, until the ring is lost.

Pavilion #1 — Don’t eat the microphone
Artists Veridiana Zurita, Petra Van Dyck and Lea Dietschmann question the relation between mental health, cure, artistic production, economy and the creation of space. Looking at how neoliberal discourse and the implementation of its policies manage to homogenize institutional structures into systematic machines of good management Zurita / Van Dyck / Dietschmann ally forces towards the imagination of an heterotopic institution between the psychiatric and artistic fields of working. In Precarious Pavilions #1 — Don’t Eat The Microphone they propose some kind of anti-pavilion, an agonistic space, a place for cooking together, for twisting language, fictionalizing discourses and for suspending anesthetized social roles. On the meadow inside of the psychiatric institution they opened, for one month, a space consisting of loose objects inviting visiters to spend time together.

 
Pavilion #2 — The new local
The New Local inquires what a progressive locality in the light of the present global precarities could entail and focuses on the role spatial practice might take within this context. It departs from the premise that both the origin of alternatives and our capacity to create them as a means to address the current precarity are embedded in a tradition based on a Western human-centered ontology, focusing on “control.” The New Local provides a context in which to question and challenge this way of thinking and this form of knowledge (production) and search for new ways of experiencing the dialectic between the local and the global.

Between five and ten artists have been commissioned to develop an experiment on the Muntplein. Instead of organizing just another event on the square, these interventions take place during the day without an audience. The interventions will be “documented” and “mapped” in different ways and subsequently presented and discussed as part of an evening program in a dialogue between the artists and invited guests.

 
Pavilion #3 — Atlas Unlimited (Act IV): ‘Europa’
Karthik Pandian and Andros Zins-Browne invite the public to take a walk in the Old Harbour of Antwerp. Guided by an audio narration produced in collaboration with Syrian sculptor Zakaria Almoutlak, visitors will encounter a series of sculptures that range from the monumental to the invisible. Issues of migration, history and scale motivate this work that leads visitors on a journey from an iconic port into the global imaginary.

 
Precarious pavilion #4 — No Peaks
Visual artist Pieterjan Ginckels wedges himself between the perfectly realised renderings of the urban developers in Leuven’s Barbarahof. He does so in a literal sense, by means of a full-scale truck trailer, covered in a dark grey skin of dust. Smudged out in extra large letters are the words “NO PEAKS”. The trailer is a monolith, a static sculpture disrupting the day-to-day ballet of urban developers and their clients.