Edgelands

Part of ProtoZone17: Stories of those left behind, 15.11.2024-12.01.2025 

Edgelands

“Edgelands” speaks to the margins, the decentralized and out of focus without trying to recenter or refocus as a strategy for value making. To elaborate this, the work departs from the geographical phenomenology of Badlands which are characterized by steep slopes, minimal vegetation, lack of substantial regrowth and common where there are unconsolidated sediments, making them difficult to navigate. This ‘bad’ or eroded land is a place we cannot tame, regulate or refurbish. Badlands offers Edgelands a physical, poetic, ecological and phenomenological site to consider age and aging, refuse and abandonment as a plateau for speculation on the problem of progress.

This work hosts the politics of ruination that comes with the proximity between ruinophillia (lust for ruins) and ruinophobia (fear of ruins). By widening the binary of lust and fear we look toward the notion of rot and decay as inherent to architectures themselves rather than the efforts to renew or cover up traces of exposure to the elements. Rot speaks of this process as reeking of mortality, vulnerability, and the inevitability of death. 

Through a complex apparatus of worn and weathered materials, ungovernable processes continue despite lack of use or usefulness. Construction scaffolding houses a poetic of architectural transitioning while body-scaled vitrines curate failed attempts to preserve where the process of rotting magnifies other things that grow in this space. Like a humid corner or condensation forming on shattered glass, this decay suggests multiple states of abandonment inclusive of and inviting a rewilding. The performers offer nuanced articulation of how an ecology of relations can flourish beyond utopian ideas of progress despite dystopian tendencies towards total destruction.

A place on the precipice of collapse and transition, the work eroticsizes architectures that embrace decay and aging amidst and passing through this dilapidated terrain. An unstable territory comes with the promise of collision, being in and getting in the way of progress by way of a communal slippage where things are in varying processes of coming down together.