Andrea Grützner

HIVE

HIVE (since 2017)

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The series I’m working on now, Hive, is based on a photographic work shot throughout Melbourne RMIT’s New Academic Street, a large area of the University currently undergoing major reconstruction and transformation. The reconstructed contemporary education buildings are designed to provide spaces that are felt as common ground and spaces for knowledge sharing. They are meeting and learning environments for students. For me, these maze-like spaces work as a metaphor for orientation and alienation. Eclectic interiors draw links to retro computer games that require the player to advance from level to level. Other spaces within the buildings feel alive with the potential to enclose those within them, and some look like three-dimensional comic-strips or a fun house. Through subtle and more obvious manipulations of my photographs, I highlight my responses to these physical spaces through bold colour, double exposure and collage, which allows me to reveal the uncanny that exists within these spaces. I like to question how architecture can have a performative power, and to what extent it can determine human behavior and change our way of living.