Get-Out // Squatfabrik #2

In 2020, in the middle of the worldwide pandemic, the team at Kulturfabrik was more determined than ever to support the local art scene and the result was the Squatfabrik: a programme of short artist residencies. Due to the project's great success, it has now become a permanent project in Kufa's calendar and is back for a fourth edition since May 2023. Four artist duos are in residence at Kufa between May and November 2023. The second artist duo of this fourth edition is Andrea Mancini (LU) & Diego Maranan & Frederico Sena (SEADS Collective). 

Their Get-Out - which takes place at the end of each residency - will be happening on Thursday 29 June 2023, from 6 to 10pm.

Andrea Mancini (LU)

Andrea Mancini is a musician, a sound artist and multidisciplinary visual artist. In his work, the artist searches for frictions and tensions between a priori antagonistic textures and impressions (cold/hot, liquid/static, organic/synthetic), from which he creates structures that emphasize contemplation. His visuals combine various disciplines, including graphic design, filmed and generated videography, installation and scenography.

During his 4 week residency at Squatfabrik, the pluridisciplinary artist has decided to focus his time on sculptural and sound tests around the idea of a trinity between worlds metal waste, religion, sound design and  performance. This project is part of a newly initiated experimental series which will be continued after the residency.

Diego Maranan & Frederico Sena (SEADS Collective)

Can art and speculative design facilitate a more intimate, felt connection to deep time-spans of time so vast that they escape human comprehension? To explore this question, Diego Maranan and Frederico Sena have designed and prototyped a kinetic sculpture that makes tangible the passage of extraordinary lengths of time, allowing audience members to (quite literally) touch the deep future. The heart of the machine is a series of gears that rotate in cycles ranging from the very short (every 5 seconds) to the exceedingly long (every 21,425 years). This mechanism will be encased in a protective structure, which will feature biologically-inspired contours that evoke our fluid and malleable experience of time. Portions of the mechanism pierce the structure’s surface, exposing to the audience different gears that rotate at different rates. The audience is encouraged to touch these gears; in doing so, they can physically interact with an artifact that has a symbolic but nevertheless palpable relationship to the deep future.

“Our use of large mechanical gears was deliberate,” says Frederico Sena, a Brazil-born creative engineer who joined SEADS in 2021 and has worked on developing sophisticated technologies such as a 3D bio-assembler that was used on the International Space Station. “Unlike electronic and computational technologies whose inner workings are largely opaque to the observer, the mechanism we have built in the sculpture makes it very clear why the audience should believe that, for example, a particular gear really will turn once every several thousand years. It is hard to imagine 21,000 years, but you can touch it in the sculpture. If we can’t imagine something, then perhaps we can feel it."

MORE INFO ABOUT THE ARTISTS HERE