The Pleasure Garden

An artistic research project in the Middelheim Museum

The Pleasure Garden is a research project that explores the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp (Belgium) as a platform for encounters between different agents inhabiting the park, such as birds, animals, plants, visitors, the institute of the Middelheim Museum and its sculptures and infrastructure. During a residency in the park the artist noticed such vast intertwinings between those agents that it was hard to disentangle these intricate webs. Powerful stories about interweaving that exude pleasure, but also turbulence emerged. Different voices in the park surface through AR technology.

First digital artwork of Middelheim Museum. The Pleasure Garden is the result of Gosie Vervloessem’s Artistic Research Project ‘Reading the landscape’ that resulted in a new digital artwork: ‘The Pleasure Garden (2023)’.

commissioned by Middelheim Museum and City of Antwerp
with support of A.PASS (postmaster performance studies) - https://apass.be
wpZimmer (residency space for artist) - https://wpzimmer.be

The app includes 5 AR scenes in which the user can scan a statue in the Middelheim Museum through the use of AR Object Detection. Once the statue has been recognised, narration will start and visual elements that support the narration will appear around the statue.