ARCHITECTURAL RELICS
I am not an artist. Perhaps I am a forger—in the respectable medieval sense of the word: someone who produces relics.
The architectural relics are 1:1 impressions of building columns, gathered on large paper shrouds. The architectural relics reject pictorial material in favour of concrete and steel powder.
The work no longer aims to represent through an image, but to present reality itself.
A surreal operation takes place as an infinitesimal slice of a real building is transferred onto paper. Then the concrete surface is traversed by the very forces that, at that same moment, are holding the building upright somewhere else in the world.
The relic thus becomes an act of architectural abstraction that sublimates the brute reality in which it is rooted. Yet it reveals the hidden, inaccessible dimension of that reality. This is the intrinsic condition of matter buried within the structure. It cannot be seen, only conceived. A fragment of reality that already belongs to the world of ideas.
The site is a roll of rotogravure paper. On this support, production follows the rituals of a construction site: a provisional formwork is set and blocked; cement dust is poured and pressed in a dry casting process; excess material is removed; finally, the steel reinforcement is inserted precisely according to archaeological informations, the technical drawings and pictures from the site.
The research consists in reactivating this ritual across a series of eight buildings, so that new interpretations of the reinforced concrete frame emerge.
Working at a large-scale—handling sheets several meters wide and applying cement powder through construction-like procedures—turns the artistic operation into an architectural venture, involving tools, gestures, and rhythms borrowed directly from the building site.