You Don’t Want Space,
You Want To Fill It

For Milan Design Week 2022, Marsèll presents You Don’t Want Space, You Want To Fill It, the latest site-specific project by curator, designer and artist Matylda Krzykowski, at Marsèll Paradise, in Via Privata Rezia 2.

Matylda’s project investigates the idea and perception of space in contemporary culture. Unsurprisingly, this is the first project to occupy the entirety of Marsèll Paradise, Marsèll’s multisciplinary space in Milan, which continues to forge an experimental path between art and design.

“For Marsèll, the idea of space has always been inseparable from that of encounter and contamination”, explains Loris Moretto, Head of Communications at Marsèll. “We have always considered our spaces to be places in which visitors can interact with different forms of creativity.”

You Don’t Want Space, You Want To Fill It by Matylda Krzykowski, includes works by contemporary, transdisciplinary artists, designers, performers and musicians, who shift between the visual and performative, the natural and artificial, the human and animal, as well as between touch and sound. These practitioners include Phillip Schueller, Collo Awata & Delfiné, Lisa Ertel & Jannis Zell, and Mirka Laura Severa.

The various shades of blue define the environment designed by Matylda alongside the collaborative artistic support of Miriam Wierzchoslawska. The space includes Matylda’s own works and objects from her home in Berlin. In light of this, Marsèll Paradise takes on a welcoming and domestic dimension, which expands and investigates the idea of an exhibition space, inviting visitors to observe, interact, and relate to each other and their surroundings.

You Don’t Want Space, You Want To Fill It will be held at Marsèll Paradise, in Via Privata Rezia 2, from 6 June to 15 July 2022.

You Don’t Want Space, You Want to Fill It
By Matylda Krzykowski

You Don’t Want Space, You Want to Fill It is a wild, site-specific place, imagined rather than defined by fixed expectations, a space in which the two-dimensional, the physical and the virtual coexist. “Spaces do not have to be constructive, they just have to feel right,” says Matylda Krzykowski “we fancy sticky, leaky spaces, ones which people can’t imagine leaving.”

The hand is the body part most frequently used as a symbol. It is the main human tool and has the ability to transfer invisible energy into form. The YDWSYWTFI hand is active and frivolous, its long fingers can be interpreted as extending into established ideas, crushing them, and reforming them into something new. The index finger latches on to unformed leaky ideas, flirting with unresolved beliefs and notions.

Lisa Ertel & Jannis Zell

Will fill the space with: a collection of non-human or bio-made artifacts that they have transformed into tame objects. Their items are often found or bought and manipulated: from a leather-upholstered sofa to a cornerstone with beaver soundscapes.

Mirka Laura Severa

Will fill the space with: a video work that will be produced within the space itself. The story will deal with the voyeuristic human desire to watch other people in their home spaces.

Philipp Schueller

Will fill the space with: a performance representing an aquatic domestic sphere. Items include a specific changing room and an aquatic pet.

Collo Awata & Delfiné

Will fill the space with: a soundscape composed of cave sounds and cave-like structures used as a way for the audience to approach the sound design.

Matylda Krzykowski

Matylda Krzykowski works with space: objects in space and ideas outside of space. Her work has given peripheral notions a central focus and shed new light on ideas at the heart of the discourses she nourishes. Although these discourses cannot be reduced to conventional spheres, they can be broadly identified as: curatorship, design, architecture, art, and performance. Krzykowski instigates conversations, works hard to keep the energy going and therefore affects the results. These results almost always arise entirely from intense and generous collaboration. Her work has had a global impact. It is organically interdisciplinary (it is a way of doing, more than a way of thinking). The tools she uses include, but are not limited to: speech, instant messaging, archiving, art direction, set design and choreographic reportage [as well as the digital space treated as physical space]. Her vehicles for communication include exhibitions, performances, publishing, public discourse and Instagram, to name but a few. She travels extensively to develop formats, participate in juries, hold conferences, develop exhibitions and conceive and hold workshops in the cultural field. Wherever she goes, she sees the visible and reformats the unseen. Written by James Tyler Foster