My contribution to Love Among the Artists was a series of collage sketches and a short text conceived during lockdown walks around a 1970s housing estate in East London. 150 years earlier this had been the site of Europe’s largest nursery and importer of rare exotic plants, called Loddiges Paradise Field Nursery. The same area is also the location of no. 5 and no. 7 Darnley Road, where Laure and I (and several other friends) used to live around 2007. The wonders of the plants which once grew there and the love shared amongst friends (in the same place but later in time) fused into an idea of Paradise, which was amplified by the strange stillness of those spring months of 2020. (Pia Östlund)

Love Among the Artists is part of Occupie Paradit, where artists Alex Cecchetti and Laure Prouvost transform the space of Netwerk Aalst into an immersive multivocal installation. For Love Among the Artists, Prouvost invites a number of artists – including Brook Andrew, Sam Belinfante, Liesel Burisch, Audrey Cottin, Vianney Fivel, Alexis Gautier, Maud Gyssels, Hadassa Ngamba, Otobong Nkanga, Pia Östlund, Alex Reynolds and Jonas Staal – to inhabit and respond to the imagined paradise. Love Among the Artists takes its title from the book of the same name by George Bernhard Shaw.

Curated by Pieternel Vermoortel, Netwerk Aalst