Santiago Colombo Migliorero & Yannis Gkouzoumas
22 June 2026 – 19 July 2026
Santiago Colombo and Yannis Gkouzoumas are the artists selected for the LABoratorium residency, in collaboration with iMAL (Brussels), where they will work on their project ‘Burnout Machines’.
Santiago Colombo Migliorero is an Argentine visual and multimedia artist based in Madrid. He investigates the memory of objects, materialities and how these are affected; the traces, ghosts, temporality and rhythms of objects. He explores the confluence between the digital and the non-digital, the tactile materialities of sculptures, mechanical objects and materials, the ethereal nature of the digital, computer-generated imagery (CGI) and the territory.
He has been an artist-in-residence at venues such as ACC Galerie [Germany], BilbaoArte Fundazioa [Spain], La Maison des Auteurs [France], Koyne [Helsinki], ARE [B93, Netherlands], CC Recoleta [Argentina], Horanggasy Studio [South Korea], INVE [International Experimental Video Platform] [Chile], amongst others.
He has exhibited his work at venues such as 01 Gallery [Rotterdam], Centro Conde Duque [Madrid], the Museum of Contemporary Art in Bogotá, the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, BAFICI [Argentina], the Basque Country Museum of Contemporary Art, the Young Artists’ Biennial [Argentina], the Alicante Museum of Contemporary Art [Spain], the Proyector Festival [Madrid], Paadman [Tehran], the Moving Image Biennial [Argentina], and FIVA [Argentina], amongst others.
Yannis Gkouzoumas is a Greek multimedia artist and researcher based in Brussels. After completing his Master’s degree in Computer Engineering at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, he moved to Brussels to study for a Master’s in Visual Arts at the LUCA School of Arts. This transition has led him to develop a practice situated at the intersection of new technologies, lens-based media, installation and performance, combining critical theory, practical technical experimentation and embodied research. A central element of his work is a persistent interest in resistance as a condition in the face of the endless demands of technological mediation and capitalist urgency: movements too fast for algorithms, dreams that fragment under analysis, intimacy that defies documentation, rest that rejects productivity. In this gap between systems and experience, something essential about contemporary alienation becomes visible and, perhaps, open to question.
Her work has been exhibited at La Maison des Arts, LaVallee, Visual Gallery in Brussels and STUK in Leuven, amongst other venues.
Project in residence
Burnout Machines
The performance-driven society makes no distinction between bodies and machines. Both are pushed beyond their operational limits by the same demand for continuous performance. The body, subjected to a constant demand for productivity, behaves like an overloaded system. It slows down and, eventually, breaks down. ‘Burnout Machines’ explores the territory in which both humans and machines, under pressure, cease to be individual entities and become part of a complex, interdependent network.
Working with kinetic sculpture, digital installation and performance, the duo imagines and constructs systems doomed to failure. Their material language draws direct inspiration from this condition: loops, repetition, overload, delay, the pause that is not a rest but a threshold. The residency at iMAL and LABoral is an investigation into how the exhaustion of the machine actually manifests itself and what it reveals about the human body that built these machines in its own image.
