Event
Guided Walking Tour of The Ethics of Dust: Jorge Otero-Pailos
05 Jul 2016
Westminister Hall
London, United Kingdom
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The Ethics of Dust at Westminster Hall, by Jorge Otero-Pailos, 2016. An Artangel commission. Photo by Marcus J Leith.
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The Ethics of Dust at Westminster Hall, by Jorge Otero-Pailos, 2016. An Artangel commission. Photo by Marcus J Leith.
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A section of the 50 metre latex cast of Westminster Hall’s east wall is tested in a warehouse in Northampton ahead of being installed at Westminster Hall this June. The Ethics of Dust by Jorge Otero-Pailos at Westminster Hall, Houses of Parliament, London 29 June - 1 September 2016. An Artangel project. Photo by Nick Chapman.
Exhibition
Jorge Otero-Pailos. The Ethics of Dust
29 Jun 2016 – 1 Sep 2016
Event times
29 June-8 July
Mon-Fri 9am-8pm
Sat 9am-5:30pm
9 July-1 Sept
Mon-Sat 9am-5:30pm
Cost of entry
Free tickets must be booked in advance at artangel.org.uk/ethics-of-dust
Westminster Hall
Address
- Houses of Parliament
- London
- SW1A 0AA
- United Kingdom
Event map
The Ethics of Dust is a temporary site-specific artwork made for Westminster Hall, the oldest building on the Parliamentary Estate and home to the UK’s House of Commons and House of Lords.
About
Created by artist, architect and conservationist Jorge Otero-Pailos, the work is a 50 metre long translucent latex cast of the hall’s east wall, containing hundreds of years of surface pollution and dust.
Suspended from the hall’s 28 metre high hammer beam roof, the latex contains innumerable particles of dust, soot and dirt gently lifted from the wall, a special method developed for the cleaning of this UNESCO world heritage site. Otero-Pailos has previously made casts of the walls of other heritage monuments including the 14th century Doge’s Palace in Venice at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009.
Westminster Hall and the Doge’s Palace share a history that runs deep in the British and European cultural consciousness: both were seats of governments ruling vast naval empires, threatened with demolition by over-enthusiastic classical architects (Andrea Palladio and Sir John Soane), and ultimately saved by restorations in the original Gothic style.
The Ethics of Dust takes its name from Victorian writer and social thinker John Ruskin’s 1908 publication The Ethics of The Dust. Ruskin’s great admiration for these two Gothic structures led him to lay the intellectual foundations of modern conservation. Anticipating concerns over pollution, he recognised its damaging effects on buildings, but argued against surface cleaning, fearing 19th century architects would do more damage than good with the blunt instruments available to them at the time. Conservation technology has now advanced to the point where cleaning can be safely and sensitively carried out without damaging the stone.
