ARCHISCULPTURE Original Ground 2022

‘Original Ground’ is a new ARCHISCULPTURE project. Unlike existing ARCHISCULPTUREs that were usually installed on the grass and emphasized sculptural elements, this new work uses the ground on which the building was built as it is, focusing on the meaning of architecture and place rather than artistic elements. This ‘Original Ground’ presents a small but condensed foundation to understand the socio-cultural context of the architectures collected in the city. Lanes, construction materials, signs, traffic lights, and cars on the road, advertising boards, and pedestrians walking on sidewalks are themselves connected to ARCHISCULPTURE to create a documentary with richer facts.

ARCHISCULPTURE
René Descartes viewed as beautiful the order and coherency of structures designed by a single architect; the purpose of the Archisculpture Photo Project, however, is to create architectural sculptures by collaging photographs of diverse architectural works from various architects. In this way, Archisculpture Photos are both similar and different to the organic romanticism of old cities built through the works of myriad architects, for they represent the artist’s subjective interpretation and decisions regarding various architects’ numerous designs. If a photograph has a “punctum,” then clearly the architectural works used here will in certain ways be the artist’s “punctum” and their assemblage the Archisculpture Photo. These works may also locate and bring together structures with political, economic, or social significance, creating through the work’s “studium” the illusion of a metropolis. Like collectors who arrange and classify their acquisitions with great care, artists analyze selected city fragments gathered from here and there and with them create their sculptures. What exist now as disparate structures are reborn as beautiful sculptures which retain their diachronic or synchronic histories, or else encompass it all. As Russian film director Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein explained in relation to the montage technique, the collaging employed in this process creates through the collision of disparate elements stories that before remained beneath the surface. In essence, however, it is a photograph of a nonexistent, architectural sculpture.