RESIDUE 
Arthur Cordier, María José Crespo and Maciej Makałowski
September 18 - October 17, 2025
Opening: Thursday, September 18 from 18:00 till 22:00

C A S S T L in collaboration with BURO_ASAP present RESIDUE, a group exhibition curated by Jesse Siegel. 

RESIDUE brings together three artists who explore the traces left behind in a world saturated by media and consumer culture; fragments of thought, memory, and material that refuse to fully disappear.

Rather than presenting critique in grand gestures, RESIDUE lingers in the messy boundaries of life, the slightly damaged, the overlooked critical remnants that survive under the weight of spectacle. The works resist erasure by confronting saturation head-on and by tracing its aftermath: informational debris that is reformulated. These critical remnants are fractured, often unconscious traces of individuality that survive the overwhelming forces of ideological conformity, offering a faint, but vital, possibility of resistance within a largely administered world.

In a moment when our attention is relentlessly managed and monetized, the artworks offer a collective sign towards what remains after all the noise fades. They suggest that even within a world designed to exhaust and absorb us, sometimes there are persistent fragments of freedom, memory, and critical thought, waiting to be noticed. 

Participating artists: Arthur Cordier, María José Crespo and Maciej Makałowski.         

Arthur Cordier (b. 1993, BE) worked in an advertising agency, he hates advertising. From the experience remained a constant interest in the study of urban and commercial trickery – also known in French as roublardise. To reveal the economical construct of urban contexts, he uses the effectiveness of commercial strategies against itself in a tautological and often parasitic manner.

To a further extent he tackles the aesthetics of bureaucracy, entrepreneurship, and efficiency through relational, situational and contextually specific works, self-reflecting upon the economy of artistic practice in a production-driven society.

María José Crespo (b. 1991, MX) completed a BA in Fine Art at the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Tijuana and a MA in Fine Art at Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. Her current research investigates how the porous space between territory, language, limits, and the body can be understood by extending their relations as gestures. By questioning how she inhabits certain boundaries as a woman, she is interested in studying remains and traces that administrative powers leave behind in unclear territories.

Her latest installation Female Flickers revolves around the story of avisadoras, female messengers who flashed messages with a vanity mirror across the border between Mexico and USA during the Mexican Revolution (1910-17). Most of the avisos were daily life communication, but as well warnings, for example to inform the approaching of the early border patrol.

Maciej Makałowski (b. 1985, PL) lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Whether they are based on screenshots from YouTube, quotes from songs and podcasts, vintage photos, or old family photos, Maciej’s projects focus on ideas of re-appropriation, decontextualization, collage, and the creation of new narratives from old source materials. Cutting up, mixing up, and reconstructing them in order to reflect on the misleading nature of human memory, politics, history, media, nostalgia, romance, consumerism, and pop culture.

The series Kolobok focuses on the East Slavic fairy-tale with the same name, represented as a small yellow spherical bread-like or dough-like being. Maciej uses Kolobok as an avatar for himself, a sort of self-portrait. He intermixes the loaf and other more modern communist-era cartoons from his childhood into sentimental settings.

Jesse Siegel (b. 1984, MX) is an artist and organizer based between Antwerp and Amsterdam. He has produced exhibitions across Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America through collective projects including Worksound International, blackpuffin, and BASEMENT. In 2024, he co-founded the Antwerp-based non-profit BURO_ASAP with Vanessa Van Obberghen. Most recently, he was involved in the itinerant artist-initiated exhibition Fairy Tales, which traveled from Antwerp to Seoul, Tokyo, and Mallorca.