A living machine made out of hundreds of meters of elastic band assembled by 64 people will be realised in Espoo by Chilean artist Sebastian Mahaluf on August 11. The construction GEOMETRY OF BALANCE will be shown in the context of Aalto University’s ACSI 2012.

The happening will take place outside of the historical palace Oittaan Kartano. Mahaluf, with the help of 64 people from all over the world, will create a geometric structure, a plot, out of elastic bands. Once the plot is constructed, people will begin to tighten the elastic bands so that they will have to balance with each others. “This collective performance is a construction of a system, a machine that necessarily needs the other one to exist . It is also to place the bodies as joints for the possible organic movement between component parts. It is a suggestion that tension is balance and vice versa, it is an apparent harmony between the earthly thing and pure geometry, between reality and utopia”, Mahaluf says.

Alto Camp for Societal Innovations (ACSI) in collaboration with Helsinki International Artist Program HIAP executes every summer an international open call for professional artists with special interest to work with societal innovations. This year the selected artist was Sebastian Mahaluf. “Different cultures and societies are constantly, consciously or unconsciously facing each other, to live in a temporary community. All the approached topics in my artistic process are in some way related to the interaction between people: The need to share common ground, the need to depend on the other person”, he explains.

Sebastian Mahaluf is Arts de Signs – Signalling art as a social design programme artist-in-residence at HIAP, in collaboration with ACSI/Aalto Camp for Social Innovation. Mahaluf will be exhibiting a work also at the Helsinki design week. Arts De Signs is part of the World Design Capital Helsinki 2012 -programme.

Artist and professor Sebastian Mahaluf (b.1976) lives and works in Santiago de Chile. His work has been exhibited since 1998 in USA, China, Italy, France, Philippines and Scotland. Since 1996 he has had a vast educational experience as a professor in visual arts.