Another Space. Permanent Construction

About

After encountering a community of people on the Mediterranean coast who were living in scaffolded structures to avoid housing taxes, the French artist Pierre Huyghe began to develop his own concept for an “unfinished” architecture. It was not only the aesthetics of the half-done houses that had appealed to him, but the form of sociality he believed they prompted: “there is not a fixed moment of com­pletion, you live in a work in progress, life unfolds in a transitory state, permanently under construction.”

The notion of open-ended art and architecture has been linked to ideas of self-realization since at least the 1960s as process-centered aesthetics have repeatedly been posed as a more ethical and social approach to form. However, a work that is always open for intervention is also a work that is never done. Today “work” itself has become ubiquitous and fluid through new forms of labor and incessant demands to work on the self.

In a world where precarity reigns and nothing seems exempt from further development, Permanent Construction looks at the complicity of architectural, aesthetic, social, and artistic modes of being under permanent construction.

Melodie Mousset uses medical imagery techniques to scan, visualize and reproduce the insides of her body. She has travelled the world with her organs, presenting them in different social, political and metaphysical contexts looking for a way to rebuild herself and re-inhabit the disembodied shell of her body. In Permanent Construction we are presented with traces from Mousset’s travels, including organ wax casts, knitted vessels, synthetic skin, and footage.

Owen Armour’s intervention for Permanent Construction includes the construction of a second false floor. It is a site for several actions: the first is by a body as it hits wet concrete; the second is by audience members as they begin to walk on it. Merging the processes of construction and destruction, the gradual disintegration of the concrete underfoot also becomes an opportunity for new things to come into view.

Compiled by a set of unique pieces, Anna Daniell’s sculpture plays a game of perception with the viewer. Before the opening, some of its parts will be transferred to Ray Gallery for Daniell’s separate solo show. At Open Source, a local author is invited to have a private “meeting” with the sculpture and write a fictional text based on the encounter. Spinning an elaborate net of entry points, Daniell invites us to add our own narratives as we meet her sculptures.

Another Space is a non-profit nomadic project space for art and architecture based in Copenhagen and Oslo. It is run by curator Marte Danielsen Jølbo and archi­tect Nicola Louise Markhus. Through independent projects and collaborations AS wish to instigate immersions and critical approaches to the cross-disciplinary field and its potentials through presenting and discussing current tendencies within art, architecture and society.