Interdisciplinary and educational program in the ground-floor gallery of the Center of Contemporary Art Znaki Czasu in Torun named LabSen, with especially designed interiors by Ernesto Neto, one of the leading and internationally renown Brazilian artists, has been inaugurated.

This new space starts with a launch of a new name “LabSen”: the laboratory of senses.

Vision and senses are both fundamental for our way of knowing the world, and should be even more for our approach towards the art. Especially for the art of Ernesto Neto which seek to extend our perceptive filed by going beyond visual and reaching for all other senses. Its art that should be touched, sensed, smelled or tasted. Based on this premises, Ernesto Neto conceived a special project for multifunctional and educational space of CoCA. “Labsen” project will thus become a sort of a open platform for interdisciplinary programs in which will be alternated different forms of artistic expression and different ways of experiencing art and its contents. Visual and performing arts, music and dance, art-theory and literature will be some of the inputs of this dynamic and multifunctional space which intends to function as a sort of laboratory of senses, or in other (new) words: the “LabSen”.

Ernesto Neto creates fascinating ambients in which relation between body and space changes. His work moves between dyads such as microcosm and macrocosm, organic and synthetic, sensual and spiritual, offering to the viewer an all-encompassing perceptive experience. It arouses our senses and change the idea of boundaries, which Neto never sees as barriers, but as areas of contact, union and interaction. It is a frail frontier, open to permeation between an individual and the world, a threshold as sensitive as skin, which dares us to “think through our pores” and recognize that, as he puts it, sensations and “emotions are the only reality of human communication”. Based on these convictions, Neto’s work acts as a powerful stimulus to reconsider our place in the world that is increasingly moving towards a form of materialism so extreme that it clouds the meaning of words such as “individual”, “community”, “freedom” and “diversity”. His works do not strive simply to open up channels through which we can feel the living pulse of the nature, but especially those that experiment with new forms of communication and interpersonal relationships. Therefore his design-intervention in CoCA Torun is ideal departing point for the new set of interdisciplinary and educational programs. “Laboratory of senses” – a new environment designed by Ernesto Neto – will function as a space opened to all kind of activities connected with arts and education. Dedicated to the local community and young art public of Torun, this place will stand for openness, malleability, playfulness, cosiness, simplicity and comfort in different experimental programs that it will be offering: music sessions and video screenings, lectures and panels, workshops for children and students and art lessons for the people of every age.