Materializing the Invisible

You mentioned using the existing curtain and light rails as a layout or imprint for the new walls. Can you talk more about how responding to the existing architecture shaped your thinking?

The existing curtain and light rails in Buro’s central space are the blueprint for the walls. The layout draws from the space itself bringing them from the ceiling to the ground.

By replacing the usual curtains with physical walls, you’ve made something intangible visible. What does it mean for you to “materialize the invisible” in this context? It wasn’t about replacing curtains with physical walls, more about giving form to something usually flexible and ephemeral.

You spoke about layering shadows and overlapping different “elements of darkness.” Can you elaborate on how you designed the space to allow for that kind of visual or experiential layering?

Darkness isn’t uniform in the sense that it can be dense, diffuse, flat or spatial. And in this case, the shadows become a medium to communicate, the texts and works info and so on, visitors, logo. So more like a visual and communication layer on top of the space.

The idea that visitor shadows subtly contribute to the space is really compelling. Were you aiming to give visitors a kind of co-authorship or presence within the installation? What role does ephemerality, things shifting and appearing only in relation to movement or light, play in the overall experience you wanted to create?

There’s this one scene in the film Perfect Days directed by Wim Wenders where one man asks another if ‘Shadows… Do they get darker when they overlap?’ And then they try to answer the question and play shadow tag. (Did I mention I was obsessed with it?)

You mentioned wanting the text and other information to appear as shadows. What did that decision mean to you conceptually, especially in an exhibition that resists dominant regimes of visibility?

Having text displayed as shadow, it becomes less about sharpness. A bit less about clarity, more about presence. It becomes something dynamic, malleable. Casting on different surfaces, textures, angles, curves.

Was this process of spatial improvisation / working with what’s already there, a common part of your practice, or was it unique to this manifestation?

I really enjoy working from the here, now. Where the output is the input, a thing made for itself, by itself.