a choreographed constructions site undermines and overrules the path suggested by a public hedge maze.
Dancing Hybrid
Finalist Proposal, commission for public art, FONDS Kirchberg, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, 2020
The Kirchberg- labyrinth is a hybrid of culture and nature. It mirrors and amplifies the ambiguous character of an urban setting. Just like a condensed version of a city, it impacts the relationship of spatial and chronological correlations with its rhythm of proximity and distance. The labyrinth makes us shift directions and provides a system in which to conduct our movement.
It behaves like a mediator between human and environment.
I propose a disruption of this established order with a color coded choreographed construction site that breaks the rules normally enforced by the maze. All elements involved in this scenario have the hybrid, Minotaur-esque quality: they are all many things at once.
The construction site , a sibling of the ones known throughout the city scape is a graphic performance by pale pink concrete blocks casted on site, moving through space and telling their own history of origin while establishing a visual narrative of an undermined system. They suggest ambiguous new paths through the maze.
Orientation and Connectivity
A thread provides orientation in the labyrinth. In this case, a bright green skein of industrial lifting strap is in constant flux as it unties through the south section of the maze. (Between Avenue J.F. Kennedy and d’Coque) The strap changes its appearance and volume through a sequence of events, it moves through the underground, within the level of the hedgerow and far above into the air. It undermines and overrules the normative path suggested by the maze.
The thread enters the labyrinth from street-level through a tunnel. Three pale pink concrete castings that evolve over the exhibition period, are connected through the green strap and follow its newly conquered path. They are directly shaped by the situation they evolved from, and are imprints of the negative volume defined by the tunnel. A construction crane pulls the dyed concrete casts through the tunnel up into the air and lets them float over the southern edge of the triangular layout one at a time. By September, all three of them will have lingered below, above, inside, and on either side of the maze and will have entered and exited through two tunnels.
Protagonists and Ambiguity
Construction sites attract us with a moment of disclosure and change. They disturb the functional order of the city while simultaneously clarifying and revealing the complexity and inner structure of urban ecosystems. They allow us to see behind the surface and into the processes that generate our built environments.
My proposal is a choreographed constructions site, that spans its story line over the summer. The technical protagonists involved in this scenario expand their original meaning and offer additional ways of reading. Building crane, lifting strap, cast concrete, and supporting tools and structures take on aesthetic and narrative roles. They become graphical elements of mobile but slowly changing constellations that evolve through space. I utilize their shapes, textures and colors to create spacial compositions. Just as the labyrinth has the ability to guide and to confuse, this interaction with it generates conflicting layers of meaning and nonsense and leads to poetical rather than practical conclusions.
