Spekulative Autonome Zone Lebensgroß (SAZ L)

For the 2026 Urban Art Biennale, Strasbourg-based artist Mathieu Tremblin has applied key messages from a role-playing game – which he co-developed – depicting the imagined state of the Völklinger Hütte in 2046, using washable charcoal on selected walls of the former coking plant. The intervention takes the form of a kind of life-size game set-up in which scale, fragment and narrative intertwine. In this way, the walls themselves become vessels for a possible future that oscillates between speculation, memory and reflection. Tremblin’s art can best be described as urban conceptualism: playful in form, analytical in approach and, not infrequently, with a distinct political edge. His works operate through shifts, condensations and repetitions, without sacrificing lightness or humour. It is precisely within this field of tension that a practice unfolds which reveals gaps, recodes situations and conceives of urban space as a conceivable, negotiable place.