Walking the void

How it is © Miroslaw Balka photo © Getty images


Miroslaw Balka's gigantic box is set-up at the end of the Tate hall. At first, the mind questions the need to reach the ramp that leads to darkness, the positioning of Balka's object creating a spatial threshold. The steel container mimicks the Tate's building so it feels like stepping inside its inside replica, inside a non-space.
The engulfment in darkness announces an experience of the limitless, a fall into the Abyss : once there, we can barely touch ground as if floating in space. Like quantum physicists  observing black holes, spending days studying micro particles of nothingness to the point that their eyes see the void everywhere, our feet believe there is nothing under them, our hands scrutinize the rest of the dark ahead.
Losing track of physical boundaries, we rely on other viewers' fantomatic silhouettes to see further. And this is where the Total experience makes sense, in the humanity the darkness reveals - relying on others as boundary.


photo © Peter Macdiarmid © Getty Images

When we reach the softness of the last wall and realise the cavity has an end, we also feel the need to turn back and escape. The visual metaphor created by the ray of light at the exit mirrors the false reassurance we can now leave the container (the entrance never being an exit).
Beyond phenomenology or metaphysics, the container confronts our own consciousness, humanity's shared darkness, one's responsibility and place in the world as it is revealed at the moment of death maybe.
Balka refers here to Beckett's Pimp as the other encountered in the void : for the economy of mean, the bare simplicity in face of the absurd.
If How it is depicts a Total space, a purgatory, a place of suffering and purification, it is also concerned with a timeless spatiality in relation to the human body and soul. 
When interviewed, Balka stresses how 'insignificant' things - the simple act of sweeping a floor with an ancient broom, the bells that always ring as if to say "this is a special moment in time" or the traces left by his grandmother's praying body on his studio's floor - often carry deep symbolic meaning. 
What is reinforced here is that his work is always concerned with the beauty and fragility of human presence.


Balka's work is charged with the memory of the Jewish ghetto of Otwock, his hometown.

The museum of incest

The Museum of Incest : A Guided Tour © Neue Alte Brucke © Simon Fujiwara
photo © Anna-Lucie Feracci

What is the link between the first man on earth and the history of incest ? Could human existence be reduced to a tale of transgressive eroticism ? 
Simon Fujiwara's slide presentation transports us into a parallel reality made of whimsical thoughts, witty accounts of intimacy. The fluidity of his speech, the constant use of digression create a sense of de-construction of the narrative, an alternative auditive space, an heterotopia of language.
Fujiwara's imaginary architecture exists as a non-object, a non-space. A museum which artefacts don't really exist, since incest is taboo, which focuses on archeology, a science that isn't accurate, can only refer to a form of invisibility. 
The art of Fujiwara is the art to bewitch, the art to tell stories.

The alchemy of breathing

A travel without visual experience © Pak Sheung-chuen

A travel without visual experience started in Malaysia where Pak Sheung-chuen traveled blinded. Having to rely on his other senses to feel and guide himself along the journey, his photos document what he is supposed to have seen. On the gallery stand, the viewer is invited to re-enact the experience by taking pictures of his pictures in a darkened room, hoping to witness the journey later from the camera. 
Conceived like a "mise en abyme", the room is a parallel space, a mirror where to watch the past. 

© Pak Sheung-chuen

The extraordinary with Pak Sheung-chuen lies in the ordinary of life existence so he'll shop for the words of a supermaket bill, wait for all the people sleep, collect his breath, wait for a potential friend to turn up at a busy train station, as ways to explore randomness in urban environment.
Pak Sheung-chuen inhabits the world in a rather playful manner, using his mind as an ultimate place of freedom.

The vacuity of the Art Fair

Double fond © The Fair Gallery

For Frieze 2007, The Fair Gallery invited Aurelie Voltz to curate its stand : refusing the imposed model of commercial art environment, she turned the space into a domestic room, a jigsaw set-up inspired by the symbolics of Bachelard's Poetics of space with different artists' works interlaced around the themes of memory and intimacy.
Its title" Double fond " seemed to twist the conventional gallery's aim giving the art objects a second life. From time to time, a mother came on the stand to teach her young child to walk, a non normative, nearly invisible performance by Roman Ondak that positioned Double fond outside of the material realm.


Enigma 2 © Reena Spaulings

For Frieze 2009, Reena Spauling Gallery showcases Claire Fontaine's famous neons : their absence leaving space for a billing note.

Claire Fontaine reduces the contemporary art scene inspirations to dinner parties' conversations, a motto that borrows from Guy Debord's anticapitalist ideas and from the Situationists' fake exhibitions, a concept successfully transcended in Reena Spaulings' minimalists canvases, Enigmas 3 & 4 : Table cloth for Atforum dinner, Art Basel Miami.
Since Reena Spaulings duplicated the original concept in numerous copies, it proved financially successful - the anti-consumerist, anti-bourgeois objective also reaching a place counter-productive to what is initially claimed.

The great white hope © Marisa Argentato & Pasquale Pennacchio © T293

T293, a gallery which stand is intriguingly seductive in its minimalist choice is also part of Frieze 2009. 
T293 is designed like an empty shop by artists Marisa Argento and Pasquale Pennacchio, mounted like a platform of shelves and dressed with neo-conceptual neons. There is no work on display, the artists are represented by their catalogues : like Claire Fontaine and her detournements that challenge the notions of authorship.

The aim of the gallery is to redefine ways of exhibiting and viewing art, squeezing the viewers' imagination since the context announces an unseen content. 
One can think of the vacuity of the art fair, of the collecting of objects devoid of their essence once serving the sole purpose of being sold, their absence-presence on the booth questioning their newly gained status. 

Special thanks to T293 gallery

Urban now

Haus der Vorstellung, P2 residence, 2008 © raumlaborberlin



For the P2 residency, Raumlabor mapped the Haus der Vorstellung, a typical mass produced flat in Berlin and overlapped it with a "government-controlled" type of living space (Plattenbau, P2). While the first type of flat was delimited using white masking tape, the second was constructed in 3D using a collection of discarded doors re-cycled into furniture.

© raumlaborberlin

The political transcending of an alienating environment meets a poetic mise-en-abime : playing with conventional architecture by accumulating spaces that mirror each other, making the subversive contrast. Creating space for poetry challenges common urban practices and rethink the concept of housing estates.
The floor mapping strangely echoes archeological plans in its highlighting of superposed rites - when mapping superposition retraces different eras and practices.
The project investigates the Present political context in the way the Situationists used to - the "derive" and escapist wish put in practice here recalls Guy Debord's psychogeographical relief.






White spots, Munich
2006 © Raumlaborberlin

White spots also disrupted the normality of a residential area of Munich. During that playful performance, a group of thirty three cars drew unforeseen white lines along the sides of deserted streets. The awareness created by the transformation of a daily perception, the boring repetitiveness of urban ghettos, provoked conflicts between the artists and the locals.

Thanks to Heike Pauketat

The way out of the Situationists was not to wait for a distant revolution but to reinvent everyday life here and now. To transform the perception of the world and to change the structure of society is the same thing. (...) They therefore tried to construct situations which disrupt the ordinary and normal in order to jolt people out of their customary ways of thinking and acting.
Demanding the impossible, A history of Anarchism, Peter Marshall, 1992, Fontana Press [p.551-53].

Dalston Mill

Dalston Mill - 2009 © Exyzt collective

Passing the threshold of the Mill provokes an instant sense of peace and loss of urban time (click for photos).
It was built by Exyzt to re-stage Agnes Denes's Weatfield and was shown as part of Radical nature at the Barbican centre.  
The Mill is a busy hive for the people of Dalston : a DJ passes-by to use the sound system, a designer cycled with her mobile kitchen to help baking cakes, pizzas are being cooked by Exyzt's architects and parents chill out on Southwark Lido deck chairs while their children run up and down the garden's alleys. 
Hidden from the city's surveillance, the Mill is a shelter against the noise and pollution of Dalston junction, reclaiming the land has common space. 

© Analucia Feracci

It isn't an escapist hideout but an invitation to make things happen : a city within the city, with bakery, workshops, bar, sound system and its own currency, the Dalston slice, baked and traded for goods and services to link with local traders - an experiment by the Collaborators guide.
The Mill is hanted by the reggae scene of the Four Aces Club from the 60's, now demolished by promoters, a context which reinforces the need for a social hang-out.

 


© Exyzt collective flickr

The Mill is made of a succession of scafoldings to mirror the building site opposite its entrance. The an-architectural form has turned into a living space with tents and showers for the architects of Exyzt.
The site exists above a disused train track : a line of gravel delimits the area that belongs to the City Council while the wheatfield draws the part that belongs to the owner of the adjacent superstore. Sandwiched between abandoned buildings and a car park, that space is yet too narrow to attract developers.


© Exyzt collective flickr

The Mill also functions in an organic manner : the turbines produce electricity for the bar/ sound system, distributing wind energy in a stable manner, bringing nothing between the natural source of energy and the process of grinding. Like Tibo from Exyzt points out 'no need to use solar panels on a house roof if we use hot running water pipes - why rely on electricity always ?'.
In the context of Radical Nature, which explores the relationships between man and the environment, the Mill gives local people a temporary autonomous space to celebrate human interaction and urban life. 


Thanks to Tibo Labat and Nicolas Henninger

Spaceship Earth and the designer Guru

© Buckminster Fuller Institute / Director unknown

Buckminster Fuller meets the Hippies is a rare footage showing the architect in conversation with a group of Hippies from the west coast. It was projected at the Barbican centre as Part of Radical Nature thanks to Liam Young, co-founder of Tomorrow's Thoughts Today. 
The film which refers to design, geodesic structures or spatial agency becomes an insightful and captivating journey about metaphysics and the purpose of man on earth.




















Dome over Manahattan - 1960 © Buckminster Fuller Institute/ Shoji Sadao

The assumption that we are on earth not to consume but to learn becomes in Buckminster's fashion the vision that humans are astronauts and earth the spaceship; technologies are tools to drive the spaceship and not instruments of fear.


Drop city

LA Dome village - 1994 © Dome village/ photo © Craig Chamberlain © Ronda Flanzbaum

His faith in (utopian) technology is celebrated with the geodesic domes that can be erected as high as needed : lightweight and low cost, they are put to the test by the hippie commune of Drop city. 
The geodesic dome will then inspire the radical LA Dome village which shelters homeless people.

Counter communities - 2003 © Croy & Elser

A second footage, Counter communities by Croy & Elser which exemplifies the influence of utopian architecture with more counter-cultural experiments - Arcosanti, Nader khalili's earth shelters -, mostly concentrates on Michael Reynolds's earthships. 
Challenged by the californian building legislation, Reynolds brings the concept of his earthships (build in situ from recycled, natural, local material) to tsunami's inflected areas in India, to show locals how to erect emergency shelters.


Once upon an island : utopian cowboys, guru astronauts ...

I am so sorry. Goodbye

© Heather & Ivan Morison

I am so sorry. Goodbye by Heather and Ivan Morison has been transported in the middle of the Barbican estate for Radical Nature, Art and Architecture in a changing planet.
Made of wood harvested from fallen trees and assembled piece by piece, it forms a pentagonal structure reminiscent of Buckminster Fuller's survival constructions.
The shelter confronts our future as it is a spaceship to board in case of a disaster. Its title refers to mis-communication between locals and visitors of foreign countries, the work opening here onto a prophetic ecological failure.







Journee des Barricades 2008 © Heather and Ivan Morison

Journee des Barricades, another Morison's project, borrows from activist practices to mention the ecological failure making the citizens of Wellington spectators of a fantastic tsunami of rubbish.
Collecting garbage from derelict areas of the city and involving viewers in its re-appropriation would reflect on possible alternatives but 'borrowing' garbage from recycling areas - meaning complex logistics and environmental non-friendly processes to move tones of garbage - and back again, requiring more negotiations with the authorities than "disruption from the city traffic"* can be seen as symptomatic of the failure.























© Heather & Ivan Morison

Land of Cockaigne, another project, shows kilos of flowers being given away as graceful, hedonist gesture : with its observational platform, the work seems to denounce the flower industry - flowers grown in third world countries by western industries that overuse local land and local food potential. 
As its viewers are eager to grab as much as they can, it swaps the laws of luxury for complacent generosity, turning Land of Cockaigne into a performance more concerned with human failure than activism.


















* Dorita Hannah, Ivan and Heather Morison, Journee des Barricades - a critical response, Massey university, Litmus research initiative, 2009.

Radical Nature

Wheatfield, a confrontation - 1982 © Agnes Denes

Radical Nature at the Barbican Centre explores Art and Architecture in a changing planet, maybe suggesting that our relationship to the natural environment is one determined by a form of activist engagement. 
Outside the gallery, Agnes Denes's pioneer guerrilla gardening, a Wheatfield which was once staged on a disused site in Manhattan, is this time erected on a disused site in Hackney.

© Exyzt collective flickr

The architectural collective Exyzt is given the task to build a Mill to go with the field which turns out to be the highlight of the show as the collective builds up audience and local interaction. 

© Exyzt collective flickr

Inside the gallery, the focus is on eco-design, survivalism, experimental architecture, utopianism, physical science amongst others, showing artists of different eras and preoccupations together.

Survival Series #6 - 1973/2009 © Harrison Studio © Lyndon Douglas 

In the first room, Survival series, a line of raised beds by Harrison studio, explores farming awareness or how biodiversity opposes to monoculture-farming. 
This is where we expected to hear about permaculture farming, such as the work of Fukuoka and his Straw revolution but there is no mention of radical gardening, in fact the show doesn't even engage with activist/artistic practices that overlooks nature in urban contexts today.


© Larry Korn and Masanobu Fukuoka

Further away, when showing the work of Joseph Beuys, there is no mention of his connection to food, land and gastrosophy.
While Beuys's multi-layered mythology is installed in a complexified manner, there is no focus on his environmental engagement.

Joseph Beuys. The art of cooking

In other parts of the show, the interest comes from projects inspired by biomimicry : foam bubbles are re-used by Buckminster Fuller for his geodesic structures and by Thomas Saraceno for his Airt-Port-City, mineral accretion mirrors coral reefs in Wolf Hilbertz' ecological city, Ant Farm, with its visionary Dolphin Embassy, aspires towards inter-species communication.

Dolphin Embassy - 1974-78 © Ant farm [taken from Spatial agency web page]

Finally, one image from the Center for Land Use Interpretation does hint at what Art and Architecture in a changing planet meant to expose : the picture which scale fully emerges the viewer, shows a bird's eye view of an Alaskan pipeline cutting across miles of wilderness, forcing awareness on the way the planet is being dramatically re-shaped by human hand.

Alaskan pipeline © CLUI