Once a slaughterhouse, Kulturfabrik now functions as a cultural centre hosting concerts, exhibitions, and since 2020, the artist residency Squatfabrik, a four-week programme giving artists the freedom to research and experiment, without the pressure of delivering results.
Luxembourg artist Aurélie d'Incau is using her residency to develop Liewen (life), a collaboration with her mother that began four years ago. The project grows out of their shared love of traditional crafts passed down from mother to daughter, embroidery, sewing, knitting, and she is now working on giving it a more universal character.
The project started after her mother was diagnosed with blood cancer. D'Incau needed a way to cope with the new reality she faced. She found it through the project, and through play more broadly, not just as a form of entertainment, but as a way of engaging with the world and processing difficult emotions. She hopes to organise workshops with others affected by cancer over the coming months, to share stories and create something new together.
Where d'Incau works from the intimate and personal, Vietnamese interdisciplinary artist Hiên Hoàng operates on a different scale. Using various forms of media, she researches whether material – living or otherwise – stores memory and trauma. Her earlier research focused on ecological trauma in the post-Agent Orange landscape of her homeland.
During the Vietnam war, which ended in 1975, the USA and its allies sprayed around 80 million litres of herbicide across the country. Around half of this was Agent Orange, consisting of toxic dioxin and other compounds. More than 50 years on, much of southern Vietnam remains heavily contaminated.
In Luxembourg, she has found an unexpected echo of that history. Learning about the country's iron and steel industry, she felt an immediate connection to her work.
"When I came here I learned all about the iron and steel industry in Luxembourg's history, I felt a strong connection to my work. I wanted to dive deeper into that history and really examine all the traces left behind in the landscape, in the stone," she explains.
Inspired by objects sourced from places such as Esch's FerroForum, the centre for industrial culture, she works across plain white paper, archive photographs, and other materials. At the Galerie Terres Rouges, she has also begun transferring her art onto wood and, with help from FerroForum artists, onto iron.
On 5 June, Hoàng and d'Incau will present their work at Kulturfabrik's Get-Out Event. From 15 June to 12 July, Noé Duboutay and Vica Pacheco will take over the residency.
For more information, visit: https://kulturfabrik.lu/
