The work of the architect Gabi Schillig engages with the space of the human body. Schillig's wearable spatial structures mediate between private users and public spaces, provoking new relationships between bodies, clothing, and the built environment. Redefining the garment as tactile architecture, Schillig explores the potential for soft geometries and surfaces of textiles, conventionally associated with individual bodies and human scale, to generate alternative arrangements of social space and modes of interaction. For Schillig, multiple users, desires, and urban contexts are necessary to materialize her work. Designed to be interconnected and shared, her second skins evolve as an architecture built upon the creativity of its participants.
Over the course of the past years, Schillig has developed a set of textile structures with which she has conducted a series of site-specific experiments for their implementation. Made from felt, latex, and a variety of fastening devices, the structures are designed for attachment to both the individual and collective body, or to specific building surfaces and street conditions. Those textile structures are there to be improvised and appropriated for clothing, furniture, habitat, or other uses. Upon contact, they transform in geometry, texture, and color from two-dimensional and often camouflaged elements in the city to three-dimensional interfaces that sensitize and reassociate urban bodies to environments at multiple scales.
The work that emerged in Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Berlin and New York, is presented in three parts that interconnect and refer to each other – RESEARCH / PROJECTS / TEACHING – including Schillig's experiments with documentation of her research processes and material investigations, her activities in the work with students and her interest in the work of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark.
Conceptually, the book in itself is already an object that is perceived as haptic experience. The different sections of the book are printed on different types of paper, firstly "Research" on rough, thin paper, equal to that of a newspaper - the "Projects" sequence is printed on uncoated paper, where each of the four projects is codyfied by a certain colour which again relates to the actual ones that I used for the different textile investigations. The last part, "Teaching", is printed on a glossy paper, all in grayscale. Besides own texts, photographs and drawings, each project is accompanied by an guest author´s essay. The cover of the book is fabricated out of grey cardboard - where the title is printed on in shiny, transparent laquer. The title therefore becomes an extremely subtle appearance and again, in order to activate the font, to make it fully readable you have to take the book into your hands, activating it by your hands´ movement.
Since 2004, the Akademie Schloss Solitude has published in cooperation with the Merz Akademie, Hochschule für Gestaltung Stuttgart under the name merz&solitude. The three different series, Reihe Reflexiv, Projektiv and Literatur, provide a common publication platform for students, staff, fellows and guests of both institutions and are dedicated to the individual artistic disciplines and the dialog between theory and artistic and design practice.
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