TeamLab Phenomena, Abu Dhabi, UAE

TeamLab is an international collective of artists, programmers, engineers, graphic animators, mathematicians and architects, which explores the interaction between art, science, technology and nature, or, in other words, “the relationship between the self and the world” through “new forms of perception“. According to a first explanation of that new perception of the world, the collective ensures that “everything exists in a long, fragile, yet miraculous, borderless continuity”. This infinite continuity will be extended to a new space, teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi, whose construction is currently underway, with an expected completion date of 2024, in the capital of the United Arab Emirates.

TeamLab has taken its artistic, scientific and technological productions to numerous cities around the world, including New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, London, Paris, Helsinki, Istanbul, Singapore, Sydney, Adelaide, Melbourne and Beijing, among others. The collective’s permanent museums and exhibitions include teamLab Borderless and teamLab Planets in Tokyo, teamLab Borderless Shanghai, teamLab SuperNature Macau, and plans to open new spaces in Hamburg, Jeddah, Utrecht and now Abu Dhabi. In this regard, in the presentation of the project, teamLab states that its works of art – although perhaps we would do well to call them “phenomena” – unlike stones, for example, “do not exist independently, but are created by the environment“.

It is precisely the environment being prepared in Abu Dhabi that we wanted to talk about. Regarding the design of the building that will provide this environment and house its “phenomena”, the artistic collective assures us that it intends to incorporate “the characteristics of a life form“, or, in other words, that its architecture is capable of “creating an organic shape“. To this end, the relationship between the interior and the exterior, between the internal and the external, is fundamental. Therefore, the architecture of teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi is similar to a living being, with “internal organs” that are covered by an “external skin”. TeamLab takes this simile further and relates it to its activity by stating that “each organ can be thought of as a particular environment that creates unique phenomena“.

Consequently, the teamLab Phenomena Abu Dhabi museum becomes an organic form “without a distinguishable outline, like a cloud“. In doing so, it removes from the visitors’ perception “the awareness towards the scale of the architecture”. Ultimately, in this way, the museum “is released from becoming a symbol” and shifts that awareness “to individual experiences“. People enter the building through “its mouth-like entrance, as though wandering through its organs”. The aim of the art collective is for architecture to exist only as an experience “within the viewer”.