Het Nieuwe Instituut

WORK, BODY, LEISURE charts a journey through a series of architectures in the Netherlands and beyond in which bodies are categorized and transformed: offices, playgrounds, farms, factories and virtual spaces, windows, beds, and doors. Scenarios that look familiar—if rarely accessible or seemingly banal—but are nevertheless at the epicenter of the transformation of labor.

WORK, BODY, LEISURE 

The project was envisioned as a collaborative research endeavor and has, over the course of 2018, gathered a network of contributors that developed a transnational research program and an ongoing exchange. This network, which brings together the expertise of architects, designers, knowledge institutions and the private sector, tests and disseminates outcomes before, during, and beyond the exhibition timeframe and venues of both the Biennale Architettura 2018 and Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam. The curator, Rotterdam-based architect and researcher Marina Otero Verzier, Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut, acting as the instigator and creative mediator of the multiple contributions.

The collaborative endeavor seeks to foster new forms of creativity and responsibility within the architectural field in response to emerging technologies of automation. A domain of research and innovation that, despite its ongoing transformation of the built environment and bodies that inhabit it, is still largely devoid of a critical spatial perspective. Next to the exhibition and programmes in Venice and Rotterdam, the project has seen manifestations in publications, podcasts, performances, new research initiatives, exhibitions and long-term collaborations.