archeographies

Like small fragments of a brutalist landscape. Slightly o!set, carefully stacked in the cour- tyard, they enter my feld of vision from above, glimpsed through the window. Sunlight cat- ches on their oh-so-white surfaces. Looking more closely, I begin to wonder where they come from. Determined voids shaped by com- modities and infrastructure. This quasi-objecti- vity speaks to me. How can something be so stubbornly singular and yet so entirely devoid of subjective intenti- on? As if a set of laws had inscribed itself into the form: precisely measured, calculated, ar- ranged. Made for its counterpart—a suppor- ting structure, a protective shell. There is something in the imprint that sug- gests form in the process of becoming. Con- crete carries something of the inevitable, the inescapable. Naturally, it is unadorned. Orna- ment is beside the point. What matters instead is the distance that can emerge through the choice of a material perhaps as far removed as possible from the original artifact. A critical distance—far enough away to allow things, perhaps, to be seen for what they are. In becoming stubbornly themselves, things acquire a greater resistance. They lose their fragility and become almost factual. They de- mand to be handled di!erently; they can no longer be so easily circumvented. I, too, can- not so easily circumvent those things that have become facts: Kosuth, Hila, Hirschhorn, Whiteread. Kiecol is probably present in the room as well. But the point cannot be to simply leave things there. Rather, these things that have become facts can themselves become supporting shells, provided they are put to use in the right way. I think one can move through them, move forward with them, carry them onward. Sven Jirka September 22, 2026