Dirt pile landscapes In ‘Dirt Piles’ (26:DIRT), Lisa Hirmer refers to these mounds as a by-product of the construction process, posing as a sort of monument to consumer demands. What strikes me about her photo series is the meticulous manner in which most of the piles are cropped out of context. The earthen textures are presented as crisp cutouts flanked by off-white skies. By extending the frames downward, I’d fully expect each fragment to cap a mountainside. The fact that they’re impermanent ‘leftovers’ was an unexpected surprise. Even so, it inspired me to rethink my own surroundings: what if such piles popped up alongside new developments with increased permanency and accessibility? The idea isn’t completely far-fetched. Berlin’s third-highest point, Teufelsberg, is made up of about one-third of the city’s destroyed homes following the second World War, a fact which continues to startle tourists as they stumble upon bits of brick while hiking. Both Teufelsberg and Hirmer’s selective methods of cropping are misleading. But it is this very confusion and ambiguity that sparks curiosity by imagining new ‘dirt pile landscapes’. ‘Soil Horizon’ by Lateral Office also presents dirt in an unfamiliar mode by exhibiting it as a series of vertical extractions, each with subtly varying soil profiles. Since specific patterns can be pinpointed to different regions throughout Quebec, the exhibit reveals a cartography usually buried beneath our footsteps. If we eliminate each specimen’s thoroughly annotated podium, we’re left with dirt piles on a parking lot—the occupation can be likened to the typical wintertime scenario of grey snow mounds plowed into parking spaces. But with sharp-edged earthen chunks, Lateral Office has reinvented the dirt pile. The question remains, however, what sort of ‘dirt pile landscape’ will it inspire? Shannon Werle Dresden / Tokyo Unspeakability The images accompanying John Szot’s article (26:DIRT) about a street art meets new construction experiment are beautiful, strong and colourful. The space is washed in light, with sparse furnishings and art on the walls. Apart from the plywood furniture and the somewhat messy exposed conduits, this looks to be a fixed-up urban loft, a condo most likely unavailable to any of the artists whose paintings adorn the bare concrete walls. The art on the walls, of course, is graffiti – some of it a bit more gritty than you would expect but overall very suitable for an expensive urban loft which could easily be featured in an interior design magazine. It is not clear from the article whether this experiment actually took place. Further online research revealed the images were actually renderings – part of a very well done computer-generated and animated tour of a ‘vandalized’ building which you can watch here: www.johnszot.com/archandtheunspeakable. Most irritating however is how the author talks about the interior design aspect of letting new construction be ‘vandalized’ by street artists, but does not take into account the social or cultural impact such a marriage would have. One can easily imagine the slogans on flyers and full page advertisements in local newspapers and magazines promoting this new loft space as ‘authentic’, ‘gritty’ and ‘real urban’. How real and authentic can ‘vandalism’ be when you agree to let it to happen in order to commercialize it as a design feature? It is hard to imagine that this experiment could take place without any control from the developer. Even apart from potential safety concerns that come with allowing access to a construction site (e.g. missing windows and guard rails), the developer would most certainly want to have some say in the editing process as to who is allowed on site and what can be sprayed on the walls. Would the developer allow vulgar images or hate phrases? Would he allow homeless people to live in the space and use a future bedroom to relieve themselves or light fires? Offering a home for people and then displacing them once sufficient ‘authentic’ art has been produced would be a questionable practice. The article brings up some interesting questions: How far can we go with art? How long can we call something art? When is it dirt? When is it wallpaper? Szot’s project is an interesting challenge to the creation of heterogeneous, original new development. However I would have wished for a more critical approach. Looking at this experiment’s benefit to interior design is not enough. Lisa Dietrich Toronto
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Not too often, traffic or a small accident would allow me to stare longer to one particular view, where I could notice clothes being hung to dry in an almost unnoticeable
wired fence. Under particular weather conditions, it was the encounter of mountains with dark clouds all that seemed to be out there. Getting to
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