A Derelict Townhouse Becomes a D.I.Y. Wonderland
In the living room of the artists Jaime le Bleu, Line Murken, Salomé Sperling and Sijmen Vellekoop’s home in Brussels — where they live and make work as a collective called Espace Aygo — a chaise longue of theirs titled So, Take Me Through What Happened, made with steel and scorched textiles excavated from their atelier following a fire. Next to the stainless-steel fireplace and wooden chair, both by le Bleu, is a polystyrene coffee table by Nicolas Zanoni. Credit... Philippe Braquenier
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.
I’m Sijmen. My name is Jaime. Hey, I’m Salomé. I’m Line. Welcome to Espace Aygo! We are an artist collective, conducting a domestic experiment by building and creating our environment and living in it. I’m sitting on the couch that I would have loved to play with as a kid. It’s inspired by the surroundings I grew up in. I’m from Marseilles. In here, I love to stare into the fresque that is showing beautiful curves of the body. Welcome to our room. We made a circus. So after producing the bed, we had this leftover material. And out of that, we made a chandelier piece. This is a piece that I like to get lost into. This window frame is an extension of a dream where this pattern appeared. I made this bath to return back to the womb. Everything in here is big, because we like to do things together. While making the kitchen, we thought that we were hobbits from the Industrial Revolution. We made those plates so that dirty dishes can become sculptures. Bye! Ciao!
