Site: Waterman Gallery

 

City/State: Providence, RI

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Country: USA

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Year: 2024

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When authenticity reveals its mythology, history starts questioning its practice. In the last decades, the act of preservation — and the word itself — came under scrutiny as an institutionalized discipline that uses assessment of value and/or historicity to visually reinforce dominant narratives or exert power on non-dominant ones. The selection of objects and events ‘to preserve’ is always an interference into a social, political, economic context aimed to fabricate an illusory idea of the past as a linear collection of hierarchized histories. The traces of those histories — objects, architectures, belongings, places of memory — are what we call cultural heritage.

That the making of history is a deceitful operation is no news for both historians, designers, or architects that work in the field of preservation in all its variables: from Ruskin’s “honest” preservation, to scientific- philological restoration, critical preservation/conservation, adaptive reuse, and experimental preservation. What is still uncertain is how and if the act of preservation can become a tool to draw attention to and question years of dominant practices of biased dogmatic assessment of value that transformed cultural heritage into political heritage by prioritizing certain aesthetics, architectural practices, geographies, and spatial narratives over others.

In recent years, experimental preservationists have challenged the idea of unbiased preservation ‘for the common good’ emphasizing the role of governments and bureaucracies in the act of making heritage — cultural heritage becomes political heritage — and focusing on objects that are usually deemed irrelevant to the making of official history. The experimental critique stands on a radical — but not new — assessment: past is a position and our making of the present is an action. We can be aware of where we stand, acknowledge our distance and hence our limitations, but we can no longer pretend not to be conscious about our context of intervention.  

 

Aloof is an assessment about our relation to history as a theoretical distant place made familiar by the construction of narratives and the appropriation of contexts. Drawings and models are displayed among medium scale wooden structures — parts of walls, arches, sculptures, and pedestals — made of leftover wood that lived in the closets of our department for the last decade and has been used and re-used for many INTAR projects. The wooden pieces scattered in the gallery space together with the students’ work aim to trigger a reflection on our methods of intervention in existing spaces, the theories behind it, and the current debate on experimental preservation. 

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Aloof is a spatial metaphor where the objects of intervention are not only a reference to preservation theories but most importantly an acknowledgment to the limitation of their premises. The first room is a collection of wooden walls made of wooden brick patterns, from the most ‘classic’ that imitates the existing gallery’s context, to arbitrary interventions. The second room is a collection of arches that critically imitates the original and quotes historical references related to the forms and material used in the space. The last room is a response to space where bricks are lost and forms are completely detached from context, function, or form. All rooms, from the most ‘honest’ preservation to the most visually detached one embed a degree of error where even the closest imitation ‘with distinction’ — as required by the most conventional restoration practice — has a degree of detachment, not from structure or form, but from history, context, and place. Therefore, the last room becomes a visual acknowledgment of aloofness, where place and intervention lose any contact with each other. 

 

Aloof is also a call to care. To be aware of our distance but not afraid of closeness. To reject dogmatism in theory and practice, and to welcome experiments and fluidity. To embrace engagement and refuse detachment. To acknowledge distance as a position not as a status quo. To be consciously, mindfully, responsibly, and kindly involved.

 

The show features the work of our INTAR MDes ENE and AR students created during the Summer Program 2024. Drawings and models were produced with the support of 5 instructors, Julia Bernert, David De Celis, Skender Luarasi, Francesca Liuni, Sara Ossana, Rachel Stopka and 4 teaching fellows, Ella Nadeau, Marianna Pasaret, Holden Rappuhn, Rachel Strompf. Special Thanks to Sage Leafsong, for her essential role in the fabrication process and Karen Bell, Katy Rogers, Eduardo Benamor Duarte.