Balsa Town - Ewen Coatesby Saskia Beudel
On a metal plate protruding from the wall is a small house-like structure, cast in bronze. Its single frontal window is hatched with fine metal threads; a faint light flickers within. The building's surface is pocked and charred. Above it is a quote taken from a testimony given at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. A guard threatens to burn one of his captives' - now become Witness J - house down. There is something arbitrary about his threat: he is simply surprised to see a house still standing in this particular location: presumably, he would burn it down no matter who it belonged to.
Through the destruction of war, in this case, burning houses to the ground, there is a 'deconstruction . of human shelter' to use Elaine Scarry's words.
Around the corner, the main area of the gallery is in semi-darkness. A whole village glows in the dark. Houses sprout from a platform like a large table, which is stepped into a pyramidal structure. Although the shape of these buildings is almost identical to the bronze one, they are constructed from balsa wood. They are delicate and impermanent. Illuminated from within, the wood glows in pale subtle colours. Bearing in mind Witness J's quote, we are encouraged to read this collection as some kind of community, or 'civilisation', and thus as a multiplication of the potential vulnerability of human shelter. In this scenario, the home, the family, the private domestic space, is no stronghold against external threats of devastation, and of violent rupture.
On closer inspection, the structure of each building is only nominally house-like. Their simplified modularity bears an uncanny resemblance to prison-cells. Or, more neutrally, they are semi-abstract: interpret them as you will.
In the front room are three bronze shapes, replicas of one another, on separate shelves. Their forms are initially ambivalent and unclassifiable. In fact they are body cast of a portion of a woman's torso, lying with breast pressed to the ground, arm outstretched. As the title, elbow to elbow rib suggests, the body is headless, cropped at the elbow and base of the rib-cage. Apart from their smooth undersides, they are coated in a thick layer of muddy texture, the recognisability of skin is obscured. Are these truncated bodies also the remnants of war? Or something excavated from another site altogether? |