Elise Eeraerts and Roberto Aparicio Ronda have been developing a multidisciplinary practice at the intersection of art and architecture since 2012. At its core are site specificity and material transformation, with earth, as the most primitive material, playing a key role. Celtic lore speaks of ‘thin places’ as sites where the membrane between this world and the Otherworld is at its most fragile. Bogs have long been counted among them: neither land nor water, they are soft, spongy and rich in peat. During their residency, the duo sought out people who have established their lives close to bogs, living independently of electricity, water, gas and sewerage.

The artists have deliberately distorted the voices of these speakers, who describe a world where nature always reasserts itself: waking in a caravan so cold your ‘kidneys will be aching’, water rising through the floor, a tin roof torn away by the wind, but there is also genuine wonder and gratitude. Their stories unfold alongside close-ups of bog flora, drone footage and 3D scans of the surrounding landscape. In these sculptural installations, the interviewees’ shelters reappear in the room as fragments and re-imaginings that are as distorted as the voices.

Since 2012, Elise Eeraerts & Roberto Aparicio Ronda have been developing a multidisciplinary practice focusing primarily on the relationship between art and architecture. Their projects take shape in natural environments or urban public space, where site-specificity, history, and material transformations form the subject of their research. As the most primitive material, earth occupies a central role within their practice, ranging from explorations of land and excavations within it to the appropriation of various types of soil and their processing into objects and spatial installations. In their recent work, Eeraerts and Aparicio Ronda examine the role of land and landscape from a climate science perspective. In a thought-provoking, often visceral manner, they allow current conventions of the Anthropocene to collide with ideas and traditions through which humans have appropriated, and continue to appropriate, nature.

Elise Eeraerts studied visual art at LUCA School of Arts (Brussels), at the Institute for Spatial Experiments, Class Olafur Eliasson, UdK (Berlin), and completed an internship at Studio Carsten Nicolai. Her artistic practice has received multiple grants and awards and has been exhibited internationally. 

Roberto Aparicio Ronda studied architecture at E.T.S. Arquitectura (Valladolid) and visual arts at the Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea (Bilbao). He worked as an architect for various international offices, including OMA, Office for Metropolitan Architecture, Rotterdam (NL), and Kengo Kuma and Associates, Tokyo (JP).