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Order your sunlight! Three motorized mirrors on the Sint-Maartensdal site gave the occupants of apartments facing the north an opportunity to enjoy direct sunlight. All they had to do was visit a website, give in their apartment number and at the requested time one of the mirrors would turn to reflect the sunlight through their window.

In the 60’s, one of the largest social housing complexes in Leuven, Sint Maartensdal, was built to create a modern social community. In spite of the architect’s intentions, not all apartments enjoy the same conditions though: half of the occupants living in Sint-Maartensdal is not able to enjoy direct sunlight.

‘There is the sun’ wanted to come up with a solution for this inequality and honour architect Renaet Braems’s idealistic ideas. Taking the site’s late renovation as a starting point, ‘There is the sun’ aspired to bring about a symbolic restoration by visualizing and resuscitating the original utopian dream and the social-artistic ideas behind the Sint-Maartensdal site.

Besides this main project, I asked both Gijs Van Vaerenbergh (also working in Batiment A) and Wide Vernocke to make a personal contribution to this symbolic restoration. In doing so, There is the Sun became a collaboration that creates a local presentational context for the different works. A context that literally takes place in the front garden of Batiment A. The result is an in situ project, a local exchange between occupants, creators, the public and bystanders.

Check out www.thereisthesun.be for the online calendar with the reservations that were made.

Source: http://iefspincemaille.com/There-is-the-sun