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Eccentric Spaces by Brian Dillon
Walking around spaces.
Utopias by Mie Olise Kjærgaard.
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Eccentric spaces by Brian Dillon
Editor of Cabinet Magazine, UK
‘This is the opposite of the “romantic ruin” because the buildings don’t fall into ruin after they are built but rather rise into ruin before they are built.’
Robert Smithson, ‘The Monuments of Passaic’
A ruin, wrote the sociologist Georg Simmel in 1911, is a sort of ‘collaboration’ between humanity and nature – a perilous, toppling accommodation of upward ambition and gravitational slump. Even as it channels these airy and earthbound forces, however, the ruin nonetheless seems sui generis, involuted, austere: ‘destruction here is not something senselessly coming from the outside but rather the realization of a tendency inherent in the deepest layer of existence of the destroyed.’
At first glance, Mie Olise Kjærgaard’s is an art of ruins thus conceived: structures and spaces abandoned to their own desolate interior logic, left to sink into themselves in classically melancholic style. But in truth the spaces she discovers in her paintings, videos and constructions are not so isolate or introverted: they are literally eccentric, in the sense of orbiting away from the centre of their own meaning, becoming other (even more) than themselves at the moment they threaten to vanish once and for all.
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