Lost Limits, an artistic intervention by Marit Wolters in collaboration with performer Anne Glassner, was presented at the Mies van der Rohe Pavilion in Barcelona in 2025.
The work unfolds through a series of sculptural presences that respond directly to the architecture and its materials, exploring the dissolution of both physical and conceptual boundaries. The pieces enter into dialogue with the spaces they inhabit, revealing the inherent potential of materials. Sculptures of aerated concrete, made with water from the pavilion’s pond, merge with the travertine that frames the basin, creating a tension between presence and absence, interior and exterior, architecture and nature.

For Wolters, working with aerated concrete has always been about transitions and transformations. The material itself is active in the process: through a chemical reaction, the mass expands, growing into the mold, sometimes beyond it.

The artist’s control is limited—she can only provide a structure to which the material relates. Depending on its composition, the concrete behaves differently, producing varied aesthetic qualities that respond to each site. In the pavilion, Wolters also used the pool’s water for casting and later for watering the sculptures, enabling the inward growth of silica crystals.
Although aerated concrete is an industrial material, in its early stages it behaves like a living organism that breathes, grows, and requires care. Its surface is partly brittle, fragile, and transient. In their coloring and texture, the sculptures echo the travertine, yet they stand in sharp contrast to the pavilion’s architecture, which appears timeless and monumental, built from materials shaped over millions of years and radiating indestructibility. By contrast, the sculptures resemble architectural remnants, fragments in formation, which in their reflection on the water connect to the moving, living elements of nature.