Gabi Schillig (*1977 Germany) studied Architecture at the University of Applied Sciences Coburg and completed her postgraduate studies in Conceptual Design with distinction at the Städelschule in Frankfurt (Class of Prof. Ben van Berkel). She worked for several architectural studios in Berlin, Sydney, Frankfurt and Coburg before establishing her own research and artistic practice in Berlin.
Since 2007 she is teaching at the Berlin University of the Arts at the Institute for Transmedia Design. Gabi Schillig has lectured and taught internationally. e.g. amonst others at the Bartlett School of Architecture London, Lebanese American University Beirut, Universität für Angewandte Kunst Wien, Aristotle University Thessaloniki, Columbia University New York, EPFL Lausanne and the International Summer Academy Salzburg.
She received numerous fellowships and prizes – amongst others, a HWP Fellowship by the Bavarian Ministry of Research, Science and the Arts, a resident fellowship at the Akademie Schloss Solitude Stuttgart, selected by Stan Allen, Princeton, the New York Prize Fellowship 2008-09 by Van Alen Institute New York and an Artist-in-Residency Fellowship by the Nordic Artists´ Centre in Dalsåsen, Norway. In 2010 Gabi Schillig was awarded the Weissenhof-Architekturförderpreis 4 for Young Architects. In 2011 she got invited for a resident fellowship at the KHOJ Artists´ Association in New Delhi, India. In 2012 she will be a research fellow at St Paul St Gallery / Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand.
Gabi Schillig´s work aims to create temporary situations by developing material and textile interfaces that establish subversive – and often absurd – relationships between the body and its environment. Her ongoing research is exploring the re-appropriation of the physical by using material strategies as a cultural technique for architectural production, negotiating the boundaries between bodies, the non-constructed and the constructed. Her textile processes are dependent on structure, while the work folds open and back upon a series of situations, provoking a constant re-organization of the object-subject-environment relation.
Besides other own publications, Mediating Space. soft geometries – textile structures – body architecture, a monographic catalog on her recent work has been published by merz & solitude in autumn 2009.
Gabi Schillig lives and works in Berlin.
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Gabi Schillig’s work aims to create temporary situations by developing material interfaces that establish subversive – and often absurd – relationships between the body and its environment. Her ongoing research is exploring the re-appropriation of the physical by using material strategies as a technique, negotiating the boundaries between bodies, the non-constructed and the constructed. It is geometry that is used as a vehicle of imagination and it is the physical towards the structural that is of specific interest – form is apprehended as elements enter into physical action. The structures wait for activation and are simply meant to be held, worn, to be laid in or stood under, used by one, two or more people, creating strange moments of social intimacy. Processes are dependent on structure, while the work folds open and back upon a series of situations, provoking a constant re-organization of the object-subject-environment relation.
Her work is questioning a static production, control and state of space by investigating geometrical organization and textile materiality, mapping social relations of and in space, merging insights from architecture, art, textiles and body performance. Individuals are required to participate, eliminating both the role of the spectator and that of the author. It engages art and architecture through the medium of the tactile, focusing the spatial quality of architecture on the personal nature of the body and on physical interaction with space.
During the Associate Residency at KHOJ the aim is to develop large spatial textile environment that enables interaction, performance and response between many people; the project is an exploration in form processes through an experimental use of textile systems and materials. Its ephemerality enables a textile systems to be dynamic, adaptive and responsive. A surface formation formulated as elastic needs to follow organisatorial and material principles that define its relation to the body and spatial properties. A large textile, performative structure to be implemented in the urban fabric of New Delhi has the potential to become a dynamic architecture with interactive, responsive and culturally evoking capacities.