Pavilion for Rachel Whiteread
Semester project done in Atelier Anne Holtrop in Accademia di architettura in Mendrisio
Whiteread’s sculptures are casts of carefully chosen objects, most of which bear the traces of human use. She most often casts the ‘negative’ spaces around these objects, which then become the ‘positive’ form of the sculpture. Often the objects recall poignant events; her recent group of bed casts can be associated with sleep, illness and dying. This work adds another dimension to the group of bed casts, with its combination of solid sculptural form and associations of air-filled fragility.
Her ambition is to show memory of the object by casting them in unique, not obvious way. With strange colour, material or show negative of an object. Intention is to make viewer rethinking the object. Find traces of use. Mattresses casted by Whiteread are or in material which doesn’t seem soft, of positioned in a way the mattresses could not stand. Her words describing work got stuck in my mind ‘that she wants to defamiliarize the familiar’.
This was my starting point of material search. I decided to look for an ordinary material and transform it in a way that it loose its characteristics. Becomes unrecognizable. This is how I came up with concrete and search of processes which could make it unfamiliar. Burning to samples of it surprised me and I decided to go this direction.
