Project Description
An Installation of thorns and air from Israel:
The installation accompanies the exhibition designed and initiated by Lila Chitayat at the Ars Campus Building, part of the 2013 ARS Electronica festival.
It connects the outer urban environment to the inner space of the exhibition, mediating the passage of visitors into a confined and defined event. Its impossible ‘walls’ of air bubbles and real structured thorns from Israel/ bring to light the bivalent significance of gateways, more often lost or blurred in the rhythms of our modern world.
The walls and the materials both act as an invitation and a warning. One can read in its metaphor the closure of a geographical space where the physicality of borders is tangible, and passages are all but trivial, carrying an experience of both attraction and repulsion, which whomever visits Israel experiences on a daily basis and has to coexist with. Simultaneously and with as much strength the aesthetic reference is clearly to the art of introducing the external to the internal, accompanying passages between radically distinct experiences which is so deeply ingrained in middle eastern architecture.
No live entity can exist without a delimiting organ, a membrane, a border, and within it the selective corridors carved for the interaction with the environment. These mediating gateways carry much more of the operational intelligence than one may suspect.
Here the materiality of the thorns, their morphological complexity and their obstinate characteristics create the beautiful mashrabiya, while the air bricks buffer and blur and paradoxically stand alongside the prickly passage. The impact is one of intimate impossibility, marking the entrance into an almost familiar space caressed by alien walls
Project Details
Project: Installationfor ArsCampus Exhibition 2013
Site: Ars Campus, Linz< Austria
Collaboration with: Eitan Vitkon
Materials: Israeli Thorns and Air
