Faculty of Art

Sculpture/Installation

Caro Simon

Residuum or Something that remains continues to exist when other things no longer do

"Residuum or Something that remains continues to exist when other things no longer do" presents an installation of seven anti-monuments that create an autonomous "terrain" (metabolism). A "terrain" of silent remnants of "rêveries" (daydreams) in which wind doesn’t blow onto the reproduced surfaces, and everything or nothing stands still; in which the terrain doesn’t leave; in which only the "rêveries" imagine what lays below the thin cemented skin and someone has to dare to fragilize them.

“Oscillating between speculative and function-less entities, the system of concrete and wooden sculptures figure anti-memorials to non-human entities. Inspired by an underground water structure found in cities (hidden catch-basins), the installation reevaluates the potentiality of disregarded urban infrastructure to become more-than-material aesthetic entities. As mnemonic entities, they allude to the vital but neglected components of our underground water systems and of our shared collective material memory in urban environments."Residuum" critically reassesses the postindustrial built environment and the dehumanized, distanced modes of interaction between bodies and utilitarian urban infrastructure. In the current contemporary discussions of neocapitalist “land protection” and theories of decolonization, "Residuum" reexamines the tropes of profitability and commercialization embedded in water politics and water infrastructure. The larger-than-life sized anti-monuments attribute to the terrain an ambiguous openness: although non-instrumental, they become relational and social entities. The body-anti-monument dialectic proposes new possibilities of encounter and physical negotiation between the viewer and the pseudo-infrastructure. The anti-monument becomes a satirical, political and poetic artifact: it plays with its parasitic non-constitutionality to the space. At the intersection of minimalist purposelessness and material phenomenology, the mundane, industrial construction materials of the structures are reconsidered as activators of urban rêveries. Confrontational and suggestive, fragile and impenetrable, rejecting and alluring, the anti-oeuvres dedicate their unconventional solemnity to the everyday banality of the anti-aesthetic. ”