GYM OLYMPIA Kyra Lea Michel X Pablo Encinas Alonso “GYM OLYMPIA is your dream and your nightmare. It is blood, sweat andtears/hormones, bodies and power. It is supra-normal, inside-out, rinsed and flushed, relentlessly insinuating itself in the last corners of your thoughts. And it already controls you.” GYM OLYMPIA (est. 2020) is a two-headed process-based research and creative project. Our core concept and method is to build a fictional gym. By suggesting this experimental platform we seek to question and reinterpret spatial approaches through the athletic performance of socially conforming and non-conforming bodies. In practice, gym olympia is a long-term workshop project leaning towards breaking the boundaries of sports and architecture. During the unfolding of the current global health crisis, we are providing a platform for people to share their home workout videos in order to follow daily international restrictions regarding sports. We encourage a debate on the physical confrontation of domestic spaces and their reinterpretation. The operative structure of the fictional gym is pushed in all of its symbolic elements: a community, coach figures, discipline and commitment values, staging and self-recording. All of the widespread components within fitness culture are taken to another level, questioning the boundaries of athletic capacity. GYM OLYMPIA explores different formats such as a podcast, role games, performances, training routines, site-specific installations and architectural drawings. “GYM OLYMPIA is not one specific gym but all of them. It is an intermediate safe space amid the houses of your friends and yours. A projected imaginary architecture beyond you and your isolated home. It is a way to deconstruct your living room and your kitchen by rethinking it as something different.”