The Spread of Time /Intinderea timpului Roots /Radacini

The Spread of Time /Roots, installation, La Loge, Brussels, 2020; images by Lola Pertsowsky.

An intervention that dialogues sensitively with the space and the multiple temporalities of the Omnia Hall, starts from the reality of the wooden walls of the conference room that have been adapted to control the intensity of the sound. Between the brick and concrete structure of the walls and the appearance of the drawing of the wood paneling visible inside the room is a layer of textile material, a white velvet that invisibly covers the entire structure. During the existence of the building, the white velvet membrane became the support that recorded, independently of human will, an image, a trace, which we tried to make visible through our intervention, recovering fragments from this image-membrane, testimonies of a future imagined in the last century that did not really come to pass, a future that has disappeared but that continues to haunt us (an archeology of a future that has not taken place, a future understood in the sense of the concept of hauntology formulated by Mark Fischer). The textile material found in the interstitial spaces of the walls was the support of an image-appearance, an imprint of history outlined in the nothingness of dust, a posthuman image, as if an entire ideology worked without knowing to reveal an image, an image whose substance has autopoietic attributes. The extent of the space of the room, the distance between here and there, between then and now, the time of the 50 years of existence of the Omnia Hall were compressed into the thickness of a few millimetres of material, depicting in our interpretation an image of the world of things reinscribed in the indifference of nature. "The continuous construction and disintegration of the world" referred to by Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov can also be perceived in the permanent dislocation and resettlement of the built space, engaged by the relentless tectonics of ideologies. The architectural transformation of the Omnia Hall started after the fall of socialism: for a period of time the building was initially the new democratic Senate's headquarters but in 2004 the institution was relocated to the House of the People, leaving the building abandoned for more than a decade. Thanks to the close collaboration with The National Center of Dance Bucharest(CNDB), architectural remnants from the Omnia Hall are presented at La Loge, which will be returned for an integration into the renovated building upon the exhibition's closure. Elements such as a wooden ornamental structure and acoustic textiles have been transposed to La Loge's temple, stripped of their decorative function and static nature. The vertical axis of the wooden structure (Roots, 2020) has been flipped, liberating its individual elements from their fixed position to interact freely." Wim Waelput
The Spread of Time, Kyiv Biennale 2023, Augarten Contemporary, Vienna. Foto: eSeL.at – Joanna Pianka
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