The House of Dust by Alison Knowles
INHABITED BY PEOPLE FROM MANY WALKS OF LIFE
Katarzyna Krakowiak
Crawling Down The Alley on Your Hands and Knee
2017
Performance and sound piece
Microphones and speakers
A HOUSE OF GLASS
BY A RIVER
USING ALL AVAILABLE LIGHT
INHABITED BY PEOPLE FROM MANY WALKS OF LIFE
“Modernity is haunted by the myth of transparency,” writes architectural theorist Anthony Vidler. The omnipresence of glass in modernist buildings is synonymous with a promise of openness, transparency–vis-a-vis a relationship to nature and to others–, and of an egalitarian society in which everything is visible to everyone. For Katarzyna Krakowiak, considering architecture from an acoustic perspective reveals the fallacy of this modernist project because, unlike light, sound does not circulate freely through glass: glass separates acoustic spaces. Openness in modernist architecture is only an ideological illusion since the interior space remains the same in different contexts, cut off from its environments. Dwelling on these questions, Katarzyna Krakowiak chose to interpret a quatrain of Knowles’ poem in response to the architectural characteristics of the exhibition space: a glass-clad modernist industrial building at odds with the organic forms and the logic of transformation and adaptation embodied by Knowles’ The House of Dust. An audio piece installed along the windows of the exhibition space transformed this glass barrier into a porous membrane connecting interior and exterior spaces, opening the exhibition to the influence of the environment that surrounded it. This acoustic piece included the recording of a performance in which, with the aid of a diamond, the artist scratched a long horizontal line along the length of the windows. With the support of the Polish Institute of Paris.