ARCHITECTURAL RELICS
I am not an artist. Perhaps I am a forger—in the respectable medieval sense of the word: someone who produces sacred relics.
The architectural relics I make are 1:1 impressions of building columns, gathered on large paper shrouds. Like the relics of Veronica’s veil or the Shroud of Turin, the architectural relics reject pictorial material in favor of concrete and steel powder.
The work no longer aims to represent through an image, but to present reality itself.
For those faithful, 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, where a brute fact of reality acquires new meaning through the thought projected onto it by the observer.
The shrouds are rolls of rotogravure paper from the 1980s. On this support, production follows a construction ritual: adhesive tape traces the provisional formwork for a hypothetical—real yet inaccessible—surface; cement dust is poured and pressed in a dry casting process; excess material is removed; finally, the steel reinforcement is inserted.
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.