#sidlisko

The visual artist Mathijs Lieshout from Utrecht, the Netherlands, creates large installations often made of wood. For Mathijs the building process of his installation is art work as such. He lives intensively this process while finding solutions, changing the composition of the individual parts. His artwork is never finished. The artist wants to create installations people will transform themselves for their own purposes.

Mathijs passed three months in Kosice between August and October 2012. During this time, he installed his wooden artwork in the spaces of a former tobacco factory in Kosice called “Tabacka Kulturfabrik” being located in the North of the city center. The heavy wood is more than one hundred years old and was recycled from a roof construction from an old military complex in Kosice.

Now Mathijs came back to Kosice, nearly one year after his first residency, to replace his art work into a public garden space in one of the panel housing estate called KVP.

Within two weeks in July, with the extensive help of local people, Mathijs installed the heavy wood into the garden belonging to the former heat exchanger station “Výmenník Štítová “. This place has also been reconstructed recently. Together with a couple of other stations it was transformed into cultural public centers, the so called SPOTS.

  “I feel today like being already a neighbor of these people. I really hope to become a part of this neighborhood of KVP also in future,” says Mathijs. He is looking over the grassy soccer field surrounded by the panel block buildings.

Working with wood, as a natural living material, Mathijs considers his installations always as temporary. His artwork should keep its dynamic trait, too. Mathijs’ only wish is that the inhabitants of KVP will dare to work with his installation to transform it for own purposes.