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WALLS

WALLS

WALLS takes its shape and draws inspiration from the unconventional repurposing of a common building material: plasterboard that is used to construct interior walls. We’ve been attracted to this material, its texture, its pastel colours, its fragility, for quite some time. Its angular form, with softer edges, allows it to take on an endless variety of shapes. The plaster dust it sheds resembles flour on a baker’s table.

Plasterboard’s neutral appearance and soothing softness contrast with its ultimate purpose: separation. Italo Calvino wrote: “If you build a wall, think of what you leave outside”. This notion has never ceased to be relevant. There is always an outside, an inside, and in between, a wall. Between thoughts, civilisations, individuals, living beings, there are walls on which people write, advertise, draw and there are walls where people piss and carry out executions.

 

In WALLS, there is building, deconstructing, moving, replacing, erecting, demolishing, composing, dividing, uniting, manipulating, breaking, embracing. And there is loving. Bodies converge with the material, then dislocate to better meld together. Divisions, appearances, disappearances, multiplications. A space between two spaces. After an era of relative, and perhaps utopian, free movement of persons, WALLS is an allegory bearing witness to the barriers that civilisations are once again erecting everywhere.

Katarzyna Gdaniec & Marco Cantalupo