Between Belonging and Disruption

grillovasiu

Summer School — Ephemeral Agents
2026

The workshop invites students to engage with the spaces of the venue not as passive backdrops, but as active participants in a dialogue between the existing and the introduced. Working directly in and around the site, participants will design and build minimal physical interventions — insertions that operate simultaneously as spatial elements and agents of spatial unease.

The question driving the work is: how much is enough? A plane, a pillar, a curve — these are not additions that overpower a space, but conditions that quietly destabilize it. The intervention does not replace the existing environment, but questions how that environment is read, felt, and inhabited.

Students will be asked to identify the precise threshold at which an intervention shifts from being part of a space to revealing something about it that was previously invisible. At the core of this inquiry lies the tension between belonging and disruption. Each intervention should feel as though it has always been there — absorbed into the geometry, materials and light of the venue — while simultaneously producing a moment of friction, a sudden awareness that something has shifted.

This oscillation between presence and camouflage, between integration and estrangement, is not a problem to be solved but a condition to be sustained. Geometry is not understood as a purely formal gesture, but as a tool to modulate perception — bending sight lines, multiplying surfaces, and blurring distinctions between near and far, inside and outside.

Through physical mock-ups and on-site testing, students will develop an intuition for how built elements shape the way we act, interact and perceive both familiar and unexpected spatial configurations. The workshop focuses on this balance: interventions that are at once of the place and against it, visible and dissolving, structural and atmospheric.