On 30 March, the exhibition Waiting Rooms for Architecture opened at Red Star Line Museum in Antwerp. Egon Verleye of the Flanders Architecture Institute spoke with artist-architect Malgorzata Maria Olchowska.
How does it feel to be able to show your work in this location? Is there a connection between your work and the Red Star Line?
Malgorzata Maria Olchowska: I’ve long been fascinated by ships and all things maritime. And this fascination has only increased since I started sailing. But apart from that, it is of course wonderful to be able to create an architecture exhibition in such a historically charged place. The location and original function of the building bring out themes that are also present in my work.
The Red Star Line Museum tells the story of the people who left from there to pursue their dreams. But it’s also the account of those who stayed behind. All those personal stories unfolded between the walls of the Red Star Line Museum. I focus on what remains: the building as artefact. The ‘empty architecture’ that is created when people leave and the use other people make of that architecture later are themes that often recur in my work.
"The Red Star Line Museum tells the story of the people who left from there to pursue their dreams. I focus on what remains: the building as artefact."‐ Malgorzata Maria Olchowska
Olchowska: Ports are particularly interesting in that respect since they are full of architecture designed for temporary use. None of these ‘transit buildings’ were designed to be beautiful. They were primarily functional. Somehow, this gives rise to great beauty.
The departure hall of the Red Star Line Museum, where the exhibition is set up, is a nice example. For me, a building that has been given a new function is interesting if the traces of its history are still visible.
Your work strikes a balance between architecture and visual art. How do you view this interplay?
Olchowska: I’m first and foremost an architect. So I often look at things from the perspective of my architectural background. I approach my projects – whether drawings, scale models or screen prints – in the same way as a design for a building.
First comes the sketch, then the execution phase and finally the moment when you show your creation to the public. From then on, the work takes on a life of its own and I no longer have any influence on it. But it can still inspire a new work. I often translate my two-dimensional work into three-dimensional installations and models. This search for spatial experience allows me to connect visual art and architecture.
The exhibition focuses on work from the past three years. What is the common thread?
Olchowska: A recurring theme is ‘the landscape’. Over the years, I have focused on studying different types of landscapes and their temporariness. I gradually started assembling existing urban landscapes into a kind of new anonymous city that is nevertheless recognizable. The perception of recognizability combined with a collective memory is something I find very interesting. Our brain sees something and reconstructs it based on things we’ve seen or experienced in the past.
Olchowska: My work emerges in the same way. It is made up of images that our memory has constructed making them fictional memories. The work Grassland makes this very tangible. You see many images that evoke a certain scene from our memory without it always being clear exactly what it is. Every visitor sees something different.
Olchowska: The recent work ‘I’m not going to cry’ is an animated film in which a city is built up and then torn down, only to be rebuilt. Here, too, I look at the transience or temporariness of use and architecture. The work is based on a number of drawings: the process of building my drawing becomes a metaphor for the process of building the city. When one drawing is finished, I ‘process’ it by adding a layer with a new drawing.
Cities rise and fall, as the war in Ukraine and the earthquake in Turkey and Syria have reminded us. City districts that are now in ruins will be rebuilt at some point. In that sense, the history of cities is a constant loop. That’s what this animation is about.
"‘Cities rise and fall, as the war in Ukraine and the earthquake in Turkey and Syria have reminded us. City districts that are now in ruins will be rebuilt at some point.’"‐ Malgorzata Maria Olchowska
For this exhibition, you delved into the collection of the Red Star Line Museum. Which collection pieces did you choose and why? What is the connection with your own work?
Olchowska: Together with the collection managers of the Red Star Line Museum, we determined a number of themes with a link between their collection and my work: landscape photos, seascapes, skylines, images of the homeland, lost homes, the visibility of history in buildings.
The museum’s narrative focuses on the human experience. There are no people present in my work. That’s why I focused on the pieces in the collection that tell a story but in which the person doesn’t appear. I was looking for that emptiness: empty spaces, empty landscapes, empty cities. The only person present is the one through whose eyes we are looking: the person who took the picture or sent the postcard. So what we see is a scene that someone captured in order to share that moment with other people later. Was it a particular mood or memory that was captured …? Who knows. But these are images that touch me somehow. Perhaps they remind me of something I once saw myself.
What does the title 'Waiting Rooms for Architecture' refer to?
Olchowska: The title comes from Vlad Ionescu’s essay, in which he writes: ‘There is the house we design as an adult, the one we drew as a child, the property of the vir probatus, the house that provides safety and the one that frightens the child. Olchowska’s prints work with these imaginary alterations as façades or as side and interior views: they are the waiting rooms of architecture.’
In architecture, the waiting room is rather a marginal theme. How do you actually design a waiting room? Since it’s not the most fascinating space, there are few expectations or rules. But waiting rooms can also be understood quite literally: rooms that wait. In that context, ‘waiting room’ can refer to the space waiting to be designed or to the space waiting to be discovered or renovated.
The site of the exhibition was also such a space: it was empty for a very long time and so was waiting to be redone and renovated. But, of course, it was once a ‘real waiting room’ where people waited to be allowed to leave on the ship to make their dreams come true.
In parallel with the exhibition, the book of the same name is being published, Waiting Rooms for Architecture. How did this come about?
Olchowska:The book is built around an essay by Vlad Ionescu [a professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Arts, PXL/UHasselt] in which he reflects on my work from 2009 to today. This text is complemented and illustrated by a picture essay in which I show my work of the last five years, supplemented here and there by older work.
What message do you want the exhibition and the book to convey to visitors?
Olchowska: It’s not so much a message that I want to convey as a notion of universality. No matter where you come from or go to, we have more in common than you might think at first sight. When I first showed the series ‘Vanished City’, there was a Kurdish woman who recognized her home town in one of the prints with a view of a European city. Such associations lead to connections between people and that’s something I find very beautiful.
I’m curious to see what spatial experiences and memories Waiting Rooms for Architecture will provoke in visitors. There are some very diverse works, in terms of both execution and experience. So I look forward to hearing all those different reactions.
Interview by Egon Verleye
Antwerp, 14.02.2023
exhibition
At the invitation of the Flanders Architecture Institute Malgorzata Maria Olchowska engages in dialogue with the collection of the Red Star Line Museum. "The Red Star Line Museum tells the story of the people who left from there to pursue their dreams. I focus on what remains: the building as artefact."
You can discover the exhibition Waiting Rooms for Architecture at Red Star Line Museum in Antwerp until 23.04.2023.
publication
The architect-artist built the book around a text by Vlad Ionescu. In the text 'The Modelling of Architecture', he reflects on Olchowska's work from 2009 to today. This is complemented and illustrated by a visual essay in which Olchowska shows her work of the last five years.
Published in English, available at vai.be
