As part of iMAL Projects Office 2026, Santiago & Yannis are selected for the LAB-oratorium residency in collaboration with LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial (Gijón, ES) , where they will work on their project "Burnout Machines".

Burnout Machines

The achievement society does not distinguish between bodies and machines. Both are pushed past their operational limits by the same demand for continuous output. The body under the permanent demand for productivity behaves like an overloaded system. It slows down and eventually fails. Burnout Machines explores the territory where both humans and machines under pressure are no longer individual entities, but part of a complex and interdependent network.

Working with kinetic sculpture, digital installation, and performance, the duo imagines and builds systems doomed to fail. Their material language is drawn directly from this condition: loop, repetition, overload, delay, the pause that is not rest but threshold. The residency at iMAL and LABoral is an investigation into what machine exhaustion actually looks like when materialized, and what it reveals about the human body that built these machines in its own image.

Santiago Colombo Migliorero is an Argentinian visual and multimedia artist based in Madrid.

He investigates the memory of objects, materialities and how they are affected; traces, ghosts, temporality, and the cadences of objects. He explores the confluence between the digital and the non-digital, the haptic materialities of sculptures, mechanical objects and materials, the ethereality of the digital, CGI, and territory.

He has been an artist in residence in spaces such as ACC Galerie [Germany], BilbaoArte Fundazioa [Spain], La Maison des Auteurs [France], Koyne [Helsinki], ARE [B93, Netherlands], CC Recoleta [Arg], Horanggasy Studio [South Korea], INVE [International Experimental Video Platform] [Chile], among others.

He has exhibited his work in spaces such as 01 Gallery [Rotterdam], Centro Conde Duque [Madrid], Museum of Contemporary Art of Bogotá, Círculo de Bellas Artes de Madrid, BAFICI [Arg], Museum of Contemporary Art of Basque Country, Bienal de Arte Joven [Arg], Museum of Contemporary Art of Alicante [Spain], Proyector Festival [Madrid], Paadman [Teheran], Bienal de Imagen en Movimiento [Arg], FIVA [Arg], among others.

Yannis Gkouzoumas is a Greek multimedia artist and researcher based in Brussels.

After completing his Master's degree in Computer Engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, he moves to Brussels to pursue an MA in Visual Arts from LUCA School of Arts. This crossing leads him to develop a practice that sits at the intersection of new technologies, lens-based media, installation and performance, combining critical theory, hands-on technical experimentation and embodied research. Central to his work is a persistent interest in resistance as a condition against the never-ending demands of technological mediation and capitalist urgency: the movements too swift for algorithms, the dreams that fragment under analysis, the intimacy that defies documentation, the rest that refuses productivity. In this gap between systems and experience, something essential about contemporary alienation becomes visible, and perhaps, contestable.

His work has been shown at La Maison des Arts, LaVallee, Visual Gallery in Brussels, and STUK in Leuven, among others.