AT THE INTERSTICE
by TAELON7 / Juergen Benson-Strohmayer
in dialogue with Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi
“Sometimes this place feels like it’s improvising with me. A kitchen becomes a stage. A studio becomes a shelter. Nothing is fixed, and that’s the beauty. There’s no real ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ here. A dryline might be over a septic tank, a kitchen next to a studio. Everything shifts, overlaps, adapts. That’s queerness — not just in identity, but in how we build and live.”
— Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi
Founded by performance artist and activist Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi, the crazinisT artisT studiO compleX (TTOX) is a radical space of creative resistance and communal experimentation in Kumasi, Ghana. Operating at the intersection of performance, politics, and care, TTOX and its residency program, perfocraZe International Artist Residency (pIAR), have become a haven for queer, transdisciplinary, and decolonial practices across the Global South. It is within this charged and generative context that At the Interstice unfolds.
At the Interstice is a spatial installation by TAELON7, realized in dialogue with artist and activist Va-Bene Elikem Fiatsi at the crazinisT artisT studiO compleX (TTOX) in Kumasi, Ghana. Stretching shade net fabric across steel poles and block walls, the structure creates a floating canopy that connects the existing compound to an adjacent, undeveloped plot—an act of architectural bridging,
both literal and symbolic.
Conceived as the first step in a longer-term extension of the studio into the neighboring field, At the Interstice is part of an evolving spatial strategy led by TAELON7 to activate underused land through minimal but catalytic interventions. The installation was built in close collaboration with a trusted network of builder-collaborators—welders, laborers, and textile artisans—many of whom have been part of the studio’s making culture for years.
Emerging from the material vernacular of the site—where textiles, car seats, cinderblocks, and improvised shading strategies shape daily life—the project responds to an already-active ecology of space-making. It reframes leftover land and marginal voids as sites of social and performative potential. It offers shade, privacy, and spatial continuity, while remaining intentionally open-ended: a
space to be activated rather than occupied.
Under the canopy, dinners, film screenings, workshops, rehearsals, and conversations unfold. Children cut across the field; artists gather for drinks or debate. By day, it’s a passage. By night, a stage. Its forms shift in the wind, held up by tension cables and steel poles, more gesture than monument.
Rooted in TAELON7’s long-standing engagement with in-between spaces and architectures of care, the project extends the residency’s ethos of experimentation and hospitality. It proposes architecture not as enclosure but as infrastructure for encounter—a subtle but decisive act of making space where there was none.
