The Library of Our Encounters is a long-term project of Swimming Pool within the residency program with Akademie Schloss Solitude, dedicated to what has changed most radically lately: the encounter—as event, presence, time and meaning. The library contains a growing selection of books, carefully collected over the last few years, but it also foregrounds itself as a possible space for a series of encounters among words, ideas, silences, people, aiming to reconsider the trajectory of our thinking in recent months of crisis. The library opens with a textual and spatial arrangement created in collaboration with Christoph Szalay and Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga.
The official opening of the library is on Sunday, November 1st, between 14-19h, with lots of time, space and air. The project takes place in the frame RadOST and the Eastern European Artist-In-Residence-Exchange of Akademie Schloss Solitude.
Christoph Szalay studied German philology in Graz and Art in Context at the University of Arts Berlin. His artistic practice that is primarily text-based revolves around trandsciplinary works in different constellations and contexts. Latest works include: RÆNDERN, publication, Ritter Verlag, Graz-Vienna-Klagenfurt, 2020 / OCTOPUS, Performance together with Navaridas & Deutinger, brut Studio, Vienna, 2020 / ONÍRICA/REMAINS, Installation with Navaridas & Deutinger, Kunsthaus Graz, 2020.
Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga works between the realms of art, architecture, and urban research to explore the possibilities inherent in the intersections between social and physical spaces. Such context specificity finds working manifestation in curation, artistic production, and collaborative organization, all of which point to an interest in structure as a dynamic of living and working together. www.otherspaces.net
