ESSAY ON CONSTRUCTED SPACE
2017
The installation ESSAY ON CONSTRUCTED SPACE is structured by white cylinders of three different heights. Positioned in a grid layout, they provide a minimal architectural setting for fragments of building materials of different shape scattered across the surface area. Providing a stark contrast to the sleek shape of the neutral cylindrical elements, the different shapes and textures of these pieces of material express the particular history of each one of them. Fragments of former built structures, abandoned in public space and collected over a period of time, they are all human-made in one or another way: mixed, hybrid materials or shaped but incomplete parts of a spatial order. It is this provenance from built structures which integrates the varied items into a collection.
The architectural form, the reference of a precise location and context of meaning which the found items have lost, is evoked by the abstract and substitutional order of cylindrical forms. They may be seen as the base of a construction providing the framework for possible definitions of space, or might equally refer to placeholder elements by which the use of public space is organized.
The cylindrical models and various particular found objects represent form and material, as well as precise location and dis-location, inseparable aspects of the built environment. Their conceptual plane of reflection is the ground: it not only provides a support and an area to be organized, it is the deposit from which the very materials are extracted that are pushed upwards to giddy heights. Being manufactured, the ground is a product of what eventually remains of every construction, the surface into which building activity inscribes itself as an ongoing process of sculptural transformation, of vertical and horizontal arranging and re-arranging.
Various building materials (found items from urban public space), offset paper, cardboard, marked floor area | 99.5 x 336.5 x 231 cm
Exhibition view: Galerie Bob Gysin, Zürich, 2017
