Architectural installation by artist Marjan Teeuwen at Brutus

Marjan Teeuwen creates architectural installations. For her eleventh installation, the artist has been able to experiment, create and build big at Brutus over the past few months. This resulted in the semi-permanent installation Destroyed House Brutus, which can be viewed from 26 January to 24 March.

Demolition sites are the working territory of Marjan Teeuwen (Venlo, 1953). She works at home and abroad, from Gaza to Rotterdam North. Under the title Destroyed House, she makes sculptures of discarded constructions. She turns houses and other buildings in which entire lives have taken place inside out. Wood, stone, concrete, plaster and other sheet metal are sawn into pieces or smashed, insofar as they have not already been destroyed by violence.

Besides architectural interventions, a major rearrangement of materials takes place, in fact everything is put in a different place. It is as if Teeuwen is sifting through the memory of the building, piling matter upon matter. Finally, she immortalises the installations as autonomous photographic works.

Collaboration Brutus with Roof-A

Destroyed House Brutus is an initiative of Roof-A and Marjan Teeuwen, in close collaboration with Brutus. This collaboration resulted in a challenging plan to realise a semi-permanent architectural installation in an 'unexplored', once bricked-up space, almost completely cut off from the outside world and without daylight. Here, Teeuwen took her usual deconstructive approach. To eventually arrive at a brutalist installation, in which two uneven squares attempt to get into a more perfect position.

Brutalist style

"Marjan Teeuwen's brutalist style, with raw, unfinished materials and block-like structures and constructions, fits in perfectly with the raw, industrial spaces at Brutus," explains Sanne ten Brink, director of Brutus.