Together, these two observations suggest the conversation pit as a curious kind of hybrid object, both a physical rejection of contemporary communication technologies and a virtual space remotely inhabited via the very technologies it would seem to refuse. Is a conversation pit better to look into or to look out from?

This exhibition began as a plan to build a full-scale, useable model of a conversation pit in the tiled space of Winona, to test the online and offline dynamics of this architectural feature in contemporary Brussels. Gradually, that hollow form got filled up with contributions from artists who lent or fabricated works for the setting. By happy coincidence, many of these works were collaborations. The invitations also turned into a program of talks, readings, and concerts that will take place in the coming weekends. It got filled up too, or will, with the slumped and lounging bodies of visitors. Put basically, the pit is a container in which to collectively experiment with how those elements will collide and interact and (ideally) generate pulsing, hallucinatory conversation.

The works included oscillate similarly between the onsite and the remote. The red vinyl pattern which covers two walls was sent as a vector graphic by Jim Isermann, from his chosen home in Palm Springs, California. For decades, Jim has been making radically decorative work that traffics between minimalist aesthetics and the functional utopias of design. Nina Canell and Robin Watkins sent their work as a sound file to be played through the pit’s quad sound system. On September 2, we will sit and listen to it together. Shirin Sabahi’s work is a window vinyl from an iterative series, scaled to fit Winona’s street facing window. What appears as decorative, abstract geometry is in fact derived from patterns of tape used to secure windows from bomb blasts or earthquakes in unstable environments. Simon Denny leant us a set of custom postage stamps, produced collaboratively with the stamp designer Linda Kantchev, each of which commemorate one of the companies that in 2016 (the year of the work’s making), were designing the infrastructures and vectors of decentralised currency trading. Miles Huston’s work takes the form of a set of remote-viewing tools. On three paddles are three altered reproductions of paintings by Arnold Clapman produced for Paul Lafolley. Clapman’s paintings are themselves reconstructions based on descriptions of an earlier set of paintings by the Boston artist Richard Upton Pickman, who (Pickman) claims to have based them of live drawing sessions with a number of demon children living in the sewers under Boston’s North End. By holding the paddles at arm’s length and staring at the three coloured dots for 30 seconds, viewers can summon spectral hallucinations of Clapman’s now-destroyed paintings of Pickman’s lost works. In contemporary architecture, the stakes of the there-and-not-there dilate along axes of supply. What is remote can be brought closer. Brianna Leatherbury arranged her contribution as a set of dispatches of non-functional buttons from Amazon which will gradually populate the space of Winona over the course of the show. Of all the artists included, only Cecilia Bjartmar Hylta worked on-site, installing a discarded and inverted steel bollard from the streets of Brussels as a subtraction from the volume of the pit’s structure.

As an experiment, its aims are open ended, its metrics for success or failure unclear. Life gets lived below floor level.