Oren Sagiv: straddling the seam

Oren Sagiv refers to himself as an architect, but many would agree he is no less a scenographer. Israeli by origin and currently based in Portugal, Sagiv has been creating structures and spaces for museums, galleries, festivals, and cultural events around the world since 2004. His works can be described as mainly ‘Installation Architecture’ (the name Sagiv has given his design firm): pavilions and experimental structures that can be read within the tradition of ‘light constructed architecture’. Nevertheless, the mutual relations between people, environments, and situations with and within space are the main focus of Sagiv’s work, locating it at the heart of an expanded scenography. He is perhaps best-known for Intersection, a space he created for the 2011 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space (PQ). Consisting of 30 room-sized black and white boxes (micro ‘ideal theatres’ and ‘ideal galleries’), the construction was located in the city’s Piazzetta (recently renamed Václav Havel Square), between the National Theatre and the Laterna Magika. Each box/room contained a work by a different artist, the ensemble creating a mini ‘art city’ in which people could interact with a variety of performances, installations, and artifacts. On top of the boxes, and open to the sky, Sagiv placed a wooden platform, creating a public space with seats, a bar-café and an open-air cinema. In many ways this work is a harbinger of his later works, and indicates an artistic approach and language in which viewers are invited to take an active part and immerse themselves in a spatial, theatrical, or architectural situation, while at the same time offering possibilities for critical awareness and inviting participants to reflect on art and space, and their own contribution to the situation they find themselves in. I met Sagiv for a conversation on architecture, performance, curation, and design.