BROKENGROUND #12

BROKENGROUND #12

Digital Photography, Landscape, Mixed technique, 97x80x5cm
BESANT : BROKENGROUND / a project for FUTURE CITIES / Venice Italy 2012

PREMISE: BROKENGROUND is an image + sound art installation by Canadian artist Derek Michael Besant that explores the physical processes and human impact of redevelopment within the cityscape, as a side effect to the inevitable upheaval and chaos at pedestrian street level. The construction sites as a constant but relocating event become a familiar but unfamiliar way that we explore and encounter a city.

THEME: We are invited to consider potential narratives emerging from within the city’s excavated infrastructure from an urban planning, architectural, cultural anthropological, and artistic contexts of perspectives. These scenes are nowhere, but are also now here…The deconstructed skeletal linear imagery portrays the disarray and randomized choreography of the construction sites as a kind of theatrical ‘in transito’ moment of endless making and unmaking in our collective identity of place.

MEDIA: The images are produced through advanced technologies of the billboard industry as thermal UV ink transfers onto industrial crumpled veil scrims through a technique known in Japan as ‘shibouri.’ They hang installed unframed from magnet spacer mounts along the top edge, which allows the images to float like smoke and breathe with surrounding displaced air movements.

X10 IMAGES:
Numbers 12 through 17 are 97cm (h) x 80cm (w)
Numbers 22 through 25 are 43cm (h) x 150cm (w)

AUDIO: Although probably not logistically possible for the group exhibition; there is a soundtrack gathered from several cities that could be any city. Ambient white noise as distances found in city parks, gathered from train stations, downtown traffic, outside bars in the street, and in parking lots.

DISCUSSION + DEBATE: Though I understand the Future Cities project is looking for solutions to how we will design the patterns, possibilities and promises for how we function on multi-levels in a city; my BROKENGROUND project is designed to have us look at the constancy of the conditions that are ubiquitous aligned to redevelopment.
The project is a catalyst for dialogue and debate that branches out from the context of looking at these ‘terra incognita’ moments, as theatrical interventions that arrive at street corners, along sidewalks, on roadways that we unwittingly interact with in our negotiation of the city at street level.

The participation of populations that flow around these disruptions and interruptions invite us to consider how we experience a cityscape.
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Comments 1

Giancarlo Frezza
12 years ago
ottimo lavoro complimenti

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