The Spanish European semester has just begun, but for Rocio Asensi it has just ended. The last six months have been very busy for this multi-disciplinary artist, who is responsible, along with architecture studio Re-Create Studio, for an artistic intervention that opened on Wednesday at the Council of Europe headquarters in Brussels, where she will remain until December. on the occasion of the change of the President of Spain.

In December, he learned that his project had been selected by Acción Cultural Española among the five finalists, and in March, production began in Belgium, which was presented on Wednesday at the headquarters of the European Council.

sunny landscape refers to the connection established in a large part of Europe between the sun and our country from the tourist boom of the 1960s to the present day. But he turns the old vacation statement into the quintessence of the goals of the Spanish presidency and the objectives of the European project. “The sun sustains us all. This is an inclusive element, which is the connection of institutions with the outside world, with citizens,” Asensi explains in an interview with Independent, recently arrived from work in Brussels. “Also opening up Europe to the world and meeting Latin America”, one of the key moments of the Spanish Presidency of the Council, together with the climate change and ecological transition agenda.

Essol is also an element that Asensi has been experimenting with for a long time. “There is always light in my work. And in the atrium, the glass space where the symbolic part of the intervention is located, it was clear that we had to work with natural light.” In the vast entrance space of the building of Justus Lipsius is the main installation of his proposal and the largest Asensi conceived to date, there are eight oval light screens with ten meters high masts that interpret the natural light that enters through the windows of the building, combined with the beams of LED spotlights that change color and intensity depending on the time of day.

This Friday, just three days after the official opening, this facility will be dismantled for the first time. And it is that on Monday there is the European Council, which serves as the starting signal for the Spanish presidency, and in these cases the atrium is set up as a press center. This will be one of three times – barring emergency encounters – when the suns of Asensi and Resurrection will part ways. The artist and studio, created by Noelia Picard Garcia and Tristan Jadul, have made the virtue of necessity and will use every takedown, which roughly coincides with seasonal changes, to rearrange the elements and adapt them to natural light. every time of the year. .

Representing the colors of sunlight from dawn to dusk, the installation’s oval fabrics use natural light from the atrium of the Justus Lipsius building to create an immersive experience that changes with seasons and seasons. The Assembly after each European Council will be different from the previous one and will represent respectively (from left to right and top to bottom) diversity, green transition and solidarity.

This sunny grove is the brightest of the intervention works, but not the only one. At the entrance to the Forum, you can see a light box recreating a large panoramic landscape, with various lighting programs and converging lines, symbolizing the common path of the member states of the European Union. And in the lobby of the Council, you can see a large shadow lamp that projects in the form of drawings the European priorities expressed in the survey of European citizens. They represent ideas such as the defense of democratic values, quality and fair education, inclusion, fundamental rights, protection of the vulnerable or ecological transition. The lantern is complemented by a sound installation by the Mexican Alvaro Saldanha. A collaboration that highlights the encounter with Latin America that they want to deepen during this semester.