oscar niemeyer

Oscar Niemeyer, Museu Nacional da República, Brasilia, 1958

concrete occupation

FIRST FARMERS FOR 2500 YEARS TO SETTLE GILBOA IN ISRAEL ; 4 DECEMBER 1962 ©TopFoto

This is from TopFoto's '50 years ago' from December 4, 1962. The note that accompanies the image reads: "David's Curse Lifted"  Mizpeh Gilboa, Israel.  Two of the new settlers at Mizpeh Gilboa are pictured mixing cement and sand for their new houses.  So far six permanent buildings have been erected in the settlement plan according to the settler's choice.  Water is still brought up by tankers from Nurit, but a pipeline [from] Beisan Wells is planned.  UPI Photo 1962

The headline indicates something of the myth of terra nullius that was prevalent at the time of the 1967 War: that no one lived in this new land, and if they did, they weren't taking advantage of it.  

It also shows how concrete allows relatively unskilled fabrication: two farmers, sand, rock and tankered-in water. And yet the results are so permanent that they take on the inevitability of geology.  It is that re-mineralisation that cement goes through that so distorts the legitimacy of construction.

on being brutal

Long & MacMillan Architects. Calgary Centennial Planetarium, 1966. Here, shown in 2009, during the construction of a new LRT line that sliced through the site. Stephen Barnecut photograph.

This past few weeks investigation into concrete started when I was asked why Calgary is over-represented by brutalist architecture.  This came as a surprise, as it hadn't occurred to me that it was, and I wondered why this very particular term was all of a sudden in common parlance.  As Adrian Forty mentioned, concrete can arouse great antipathy, and brutalism seems a fitting epithet.  

We do have a lot of semi-civic buildings done in the early 1960s for education boards, the library, the YMCA, a police station, a remand centre (torn down last year) which sit like dark suspicious toads at the east side of downtown.  Late 1950s / early 60s Calgary commercial towers, lovely office buildings of enamelled spandrel panels and opening clear glass windows, had none of the brooding qualities of the institutional architecture built at the same time. 

What were they brooding over?  Probably the threat of civil unrest that so dominated the United States at the time.  The concrete Calgary Board of Education Building is a version of the concrete Boston City Hall, which itself was a version of Le Corbusier's concrete La Tourette, a monastery for retreat and isolation, not qualities useful for either a city hall or an education administration building.  The line of influence from Paul Rudolph et al to Calgary came with the first oil boom.

Did we have civil unrest?  no.  Were we under threat from the USSR?  only geographically, as at the time everyone thought a US/USSR war would be fought over northern Canada.  Was the oil industry worried?  clearly not.  It built vulnerable, glassy, curtain wall towers, and still does.  

Our best building from the era was Long & MacMillan's Centennial Planetarium: a great eruption of roughly-poured concrete that looked as if the geologic substrata had cracked open the grassy prairie. It was topped with a moon-like dome that did all the stars and space stuff.  When space was no longer magical, it became the Telus Science Centre, which has since moved elsewhere.  The building might now become a city art gallery.  Somehow its architecture has become completely marooned, both formally, physically and conceptually.

Adrian Forty: the metaphysics of concrete (21 Feb 2012)

For when you have 40 minutes, here is one of University College London's lunchtime lectures:

from the YouTube posting:

'Uploaded by UCLLHL on 27 Feb 2012

Professor Adrian Forty (UCL Bartlett School of Architecture)

Almost three tons of concrete are produced every year for each man, woman and child on the planet. It is now second only to water in terms of human consumption. Yet how has the astonishing take-up of this new medium within little over a century been accommodated into our mental universe? While it has transformed the lives of many people, in Western countries it has been widely vilified, blamed for making everywhere look the same, and for erasing nature. Architects and engineers, although they have primary responsibility for 'interpreting' concrete, are not the only people to employ the medium, and many other occupations - politicians, artists, writers, filmmakers, churchmen - have made use of concrete for purposes of their own. The results are often contentious, and draw attention to the contradictions present in how we think about our physical surroundings.'

concrete bombs

Soviet WWII 25kg concrete Avia bomb

I'm not sure that this isn't some elaborate hoax, but there seems to be enough history from different eras that it must be true. 

Concrete bombs were made between November 1941 and August 1942 in Novorossiisk, USSR, until the German Army approached and the concrete plants were moved away from the front to Georgia.  Concrete casings were made for bombs up to five tons, stuffed with either explosives or chemicals.
Slate mines, also Soviet WWII weapons, cast asbestos concrete into slabs (or slates) which then were assembled into boxes and stuffed with explosives.  Only the fuses were metal, so escaped mine-detectors. Slate mines were very inexpensive, but quite fragile.

Solid low-collateral damage small-dimension concrete bombs were used by the US Army in the late 1990s and again in the Iraq War, laser-guided for direct hits on specific targets. In theory, there is less collateral damage in civilian areas because there isn't the wide spread of shrapnel.  Some concrete bombs are loaded with explosives; many are concrete alone, relying on speed and weight to knock out a narrow target.

A 300kg concrete bomb was dropped by a French Mirage on a Libyan tank in 2010.

–

Iran's ultra-high performance concrete, UHPC, is made of sand, cement, powdered quartz and, variously, polypropylene fibres, long steel fibres, plus various metal-oxide nanoparticles. The stronger the concrete bunkers, and UHPC is seven times stronger, the larger and more penetrating must the missiles be.  The larger the missiles and bombs, the larger and more reinforced the bombers must be.  Right now, according to this 2012 piece in the Economist, 'Smart concrete', there are 'bombs which can tunnel through hundred of metres of rock and concrete'.  

On one hand we have great chunks of concrete dropping from the sky onto tanks, on the other we have nanotechnology escalating bombing and bunkering to a scale unimaginable to civilians.  The US Air Force has acquired the Guided Bomb Unit-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator which weighs 15 tons and can penetrate 200' of hardened concrete.  There is more semi-technical stuff here.

Someone on one of the military forums, which one is inevitably drawn into when tracking down anything at all to do with war things, commented, 'it is the 1st century meets the 21st', by which I think he meant laser-GPS-guided boulders.

aggregate

Metalled road, Reinga, New Zealand.

Aggregate, in general, is mined, either as gravel or as stone which is then crushed to roughly 10mm sized pieces for concrete.  Historically this rock was called metal, from the Greek, metallon, or quarry/ore/metal, from which comes the term, a metalled road, something one finds in John Buchan novels where the hero and his invariably boyish girl companion hurtle across Scotland in their roadster on narrow tracks and if lucky, a metalled road.  Which merely means a gravel road.  The term is still used in New Zealand evidently.

Metalling is a process developed by John McAdam in 1820 where layers of ever-smaller sized aggregate are laid down on the road bed and with wear the sharp edges will pack together making a dense and weatherproof surface.  It is made even finer if the surface is coated with a mixture of stone dust and water, filling up any gaps between the stones.  Coating the lot with tar (tarmac) reduces dust as the surface stones break down with excessive wear.  

Asphalt is a name for bitumen, something we know a lot about here: originally called the tar sands of northern Alberta, the scientifically neutral term is the bitumen sands, the industry term is the oil sands: it is all heavy semi-solid petroleum.  Whatever, an asphalt concrete road which is what most of our roads are, is a gravel road topped with a layer of aggregate mixed with bitumen as the binder, rather than cement.

None of this is exotic, the basic materials seem to be everywhere, and evidently aggregate mining is what most of mining consists of.  There is a nasty history to rock breaking however, considered hard labour and done by prisoners well into the 20th century – including Nelson Mandela on Robben Island, and it is still done by women and children in the more benighted parts of the world.

glass cullet

Glass cullet is what all your recycled bottles become: pieces of glass smaller than 19mm but larger than .075 mm, $300-500/ton depending on colour, composition (borosylicate lab glass for example) and destination – glass production, landscape material or aggregate.

Concretes made with green glass cullet aggregate have been found to be stronger, attributed to better bonding with the cement – this reported in the Magazine of Concrete Research in 2004.  And while it seems that glass cullet concrete is used for lots of rough applications such as roadbeds and fill, as an aggregate in concrete it increases the strength and insulation value, glass having better thermal qualities that other aggregates.  

So, what does it look like?  This is a decorative application, if used as normal aggregate it would be invisible.

 pretty, but is it only used for counter tops? Ah. yes. washed gravel aggregate is $4/ton.

However, milled glass has been used as a partial replacement for cement, where the glass undergoes 'pozzolanic reactions with cement hydrates, forming secondary calcium silicate hydrate', producing 'significant gains in strength and durability of recycled aggregate concrete'. [This from a really interesting paper by Roz-Ud-Din Nassar and Parviz Soroushian here]   Milled glass in the cement allows a greater range of waste material to be used as aggregate.  

It is very interesting that such an ancient building material, formed through a series of chemical reactions, is so complex, certainly not to be taken for granted that we know all there is to know about it after many centuries of use.

Glass in all its lovely varieties – Gabbert Cullet in Williamstown West Virginia:

Gabbert Cullet, Williamstown, West Virginia. The backlot

t-walls

New World Design LLC, the Future Project – T-Wall Housing Proposal, Al Querna, Iraq

T-walls are the concrete units devised for the West Bank barrier wall in Israel.  Different versions are used throughout Iraq and Afghanistan by the US Army: the 1.1m Texas, the 3.7m Bremer, the 6m Alaska.  The 1m traffic barrier, Jersey, has sloped edges at the base and is used on highways seemingly everywhere.

New World Design, Jeffrey Olinger, Heather Boesch, Darby Foreman and Cliona McKenna, have developed a housing project based on T-walls for Al Querna, Iraq.  The T-wall unit is at once concrete wall and foundation: the units are deployed in a morse code grid, and houses are developed from and between them.  A basic L-shaped house unit multiplies to make alleys and courtyards in a number of configurations.  

The project is simple and subversive.  It is useful and uses the defences of war.  It is culturally cognisant and based on imperialist debris.  How much more interesting can this be?

Despite that the term, T-Wall, is a registered trademark of the Neel Company in Virginia for precast retaining walls, t-wall is the common name for the barrier units.  The Arab Land Group, established in 2003 and headquartered in the UAE to work with the US Army, manufactures the barriers.  

Clearly the shape of a pre-cast reinforced concrete slab with a footing cannot be proprietal, any more than can be a gable roof.  What New World Design has done is to appropriate a form that divides and obstructs, and to de-nature its malevolence as a form by embedding it in the construction of housing.

concrete cities

Palestinians sort through the rubble of a house hit by an Israeli air strike in Gaza City, Nov. 18, 2012. Alessio Romezi, photographer, for Time

In the recent coverage of the civil war in Syria and just this past few weeks, the bombings in Gaza City, one is struck by the sheer amount of concrete and rebar left in great tumbled piles.  No trees, no wood, no parks or lawns, Palestinian refugee camps and Gaza itself are dense concrete worlds.  

North Africa and the Middle East sit on a shield of limestone, interleaved with layers of sandstone.  It is all made clear in a really interesting paper on the significance of reef limestones. Calcareous limestone: fossils and shells, sand from the edges of the ocean, oil from the animals and vegetation that lived there: it is geology itself that produces the wealth, the tensions and the landscapes of the Middle East, and has for a long time: the pyramids are sandstone blocks, faced with limestone sheets.  Photographs of Palestine in the 1920s show a sandstone architecture, however, quarrying and building in stone is not the process for quick reconstruction in war, concrete clearly is.  

Concrete debris can be re-used as aggregate: it isn't as strong, but there is lots of it.  All the steel reinforcing bars and mesh can be hammered out and re-used, and concrete can always be mixed in small batches, by hand if necessary.  Not that the entire Gaza Strip is in rubble; there are concrete companies with perky websites just as there are anywhere else.

The Israeli blockade of Gaza allows the entry of construction materials from Egypt only for Palestinian Authority projects.  As the PA does not operate in Gaza, Hamas does, the list is effectively embargoed.  Nonetheless, the territory sits on limestone, abuts an ocean full of sand, and is provided with rubble of all kinds on a regular basis.

mega-quarry woes

Melancthon is 120 kms north west of Toronto. This area is classified as Class 1 agricultural land, boasting a rare and unique soil called Honeywood Silt Loam which grows a multitude of vegetables, especially potatoes, and serves as a source of local food production for the Greater Toronto Area

Melancthon Township, Ontario, potato farms.  2011 a US-backed company applied to the provincial government for a limestone quarry.  2400 acres, a billion tons of Amabel dolostone 58 metres deep.  Big protests: farmers, First Nations, ranchers, environmentalists.  Big problems with water, as 58 metres is well below the water table, water, 600 million litres a day would rush into the excavation and have to be taken away.  To where and how?

Yesterday, project abandoned.  The Globe reports that 6 years ago a purported potato farmer started to acquire land, and last year the mega-quarry was announced.  The spokesperson for Highland Companies which owns the land and will continue to farm it, said the problem is that they didn't engage the local community or explain well enough the benefits of the mega-quarry. 

This is how CAPP always puts it and why they run a massive campaign on how wonderful oil sands development is on Canadian television channels: if the public objects to any kind of resource-extraction development such as the oil sands, or in this case, a mega-quarry, it is because the public doesn't have the right information.  Then throw in how many jobs have now been lost with both the quarry and related industries and well, the public is a fool.

The Suzuki Foundation didn't think it such a good idea; they aren't exactly ignorant, and the local website the map above comes from lays out some very convincing information. And it might be that the public does have the 'right information' but doesn't like it, or believe it. Must the equation be money/jobs vs environment, even if that environment isn't wilderness but is already engaged in some other industrial capacity, such as agriculture?  

It shows what a player limestone is: roads, building, development – a mega-industry with mega-installations. 

lime kilns

Near Victoria, BC: the lime kiln of the Atkins Brothers Silica Lime Brick Company, near the boundary of View Royal and Langford. Enough lime was being produced to justify a spur line from the E.&N. Railway, shipping a thousand barrels up island in 1899. Lime operations continued until the 1930s when the land was purchased by the Department of National Defence. Robert Duffus: 1977 photograph

There is a Lime Kiln Lake near Pincher Creek in southern Alberta, the Lime Kiln Trail in Ottawa, the Hart Road Lime Kiln Conservation Plan in View Royal near Victoria BC, Lime Kiln Bay in New Brunswick – when you start to look, they were everywhere.  

Funny how things channel sometimes.  Last night was reading Agatha Christie's The Disappearance of Mr Davenheim, written sometime before 1924, where Mr Davenheim walks to the post office and vanishes.  However, there is a lake, a path, a gate, and beyond it, a lime kiln.  Ah.  This is how a body can be disposed of – throw it into quicklime which will dissolve everything except Mr Davenheim's distinctive gold and diamond ring – well, it didn't happen that way, but it does indicate that lime kilns were local, ubiquitous and in use.  Every town, every estate, every builder probably had one, for lime is essential for all cement work: mortar, parging, grout, stucco, pathways, foundations, floors.  It was also used as fertilizer and so essential to agriculture.

I'm closing in on the process: you burn limestone, or calcium carbonate (CaCO3), which gives you quicklime, or calcium oxide (CaO).  You mix quicklime with water to get slaked lime, or calcium hydroxide (Ca[OH]2).  This is used in cementitious building products, including whitewash, which is slaked lime and chalk.  Over time as slaked lime dries and hardens, it loses water and absorbs carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, reverting back to limestone.   What a process.  

limestone

Palliser Limestone Formation: at the base of Heart Mountain, next to the Canadian Pacific Railway at Exshaw, Alberta, about 900 000 tonnes are quarried annually, sliced off the hillside like carving a block of butter. Natural gas supplies the energy to turn it into cement powder.

Portland cement: limestone is fired at 1450C, a process which frees CO2 from calcium carbonate to form calcium oxide, or quicklime. Gypsum is added, and depending on geography, a number of other additives such as fly ash, blast furnace slag, silica fume, various clinkers, sometimes metakaolin (to make it very white).

Strangely, cements are considered natural materials, I suppose because they are made of 'natural' mined minerals, such as limestone and bauxite.  Now here is an interesting one: calcium sulfoaluminate low-energy cements require lower kiln temperatures, less limestone, thus less fuel consumption, less CO2 emissions, but 'significantly higher' SO2 emissions, which if I recall leads to acid rain.

Green cements using waste containing calcium, silica, alumni or iron, can replace clay, shale and limestone in the kiln, and other waste material can be used as fuel rather than coal or natural gas.  It isn't clear if this produces cement that can be used for structural concrete.

Novacem, a research facility in the UK, has developed a magnesium silicate-based strong cement which absorbs CO2 as it hardens, making it carbon negative.  Geologically speaking, limestone is very common throughout the world, supposedly so are magnesium silicates.  Although one can develop a new carbon negative cement, getting it to replace existing, long-standing industrial processes is more difficult.  Magnesium silicate is more commonly known as talc [Persian تالک] as in talcum powder: soft metamorphic rock, the main ingredient of soapstone.

But. but. and this is what I can't find, does the concrete made from all these different cements feel and look different from the energy consumptive Portland cement?

béton brut

 The columns under the Queen Elizabeth Hall, South Bank, London. 1967 Hubert Bennett, GLC, architect

This is the underpinning of the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank, London, built in 1967.  The South Bank was a massive cultural centre built after WWII in Lambeth. It epitomises what came to be known in Britain as Brutalism, the term derived from béton brut, or raw concrete, but with all the unfortunate overtones of brutal thuggery.

The image above shows precisely what annoyed Fisac about rough board formwork: it looked more like carpentry than heavy, plastic concrete.  That is all true in terms of material, but in terms of construction and the fabrication of buildings there is something quite wonderful about the fragility of wooden boards, carpentered together because they are needed by the big brute to make form.  The boards leave their ghostly presence behind, forever imprinted on the obduracy of concrete.  The whole building is built twice: once in wood, then again in concrete; the wood is a mould, the concrete the sculptor's material. 

We rarely see concrete formed this way for large projects anymore, unless for bridge piers and earthworks, and of course foundations; the concrete mostly visible in buildings is pre-cast, all the slots, channels, fixing points and surfaces carefully designed and controlled off-site.  This gives the surfaces the ability to be decorative, less forceful than rough poured concrete.  I really dislike precast concrete.  There is so much of it.

Matsys: P_Wall

Matsys, P_Wall. Banvard Gallery, Knowlton School of Architecture, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio. 
15′ x 9′ x 1′, 200

Matsys, the studio of Andrew Kudless, investigates architecture as a material 'body' with its own behaviours, forms and processes of integration.  One of the most photogenic projects is P_Wall, which uses plaster and nylon fabric.  Lest one think this is a random or organic form, it actually derives from pattern analysis. From Matsys's website: 'Starting from an image, a cloud of points is generated based on the image’s grayscale values. These points are then used to mark the positions of dowels which constrain the elasticity in the fabric formwork. Plaster is then poured into the mould and the fabric expands under the weight of the plaster. The resultant plaster tile has a certain resonance with the body as it sags, expands, and stretches in its own relationship with gravity and structure. Assembled into a larger surface, a pattern emerges between the initial image’s grayscale tones and the shadows produced by the wall.'

I love the way we shift from the poetry of 'a cloud of points' to the clunkiness of dowels; such is the process of making architecture.  However, another phrase, 'the self-organization of material under force' is a powerful concept.

Matsys, studio: P-Wall tiles drying, 2009.In 2009 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art commissioned a 45' x 12' P_Wall for the exhibition Sensate: Bodies and Design.  Because this kind of hard surfaced building material – they are essentially tiles, to be attached to walls – is unlike any other we have seen, the form calls up any number of metaphoric readings.  Henry Urbach, the curator of Sensate' in his curatorial essay went directly to the parallels with the human body, as if we were also stretchy sacs pinned together, bulging with the weight of too much weight.  

A detail shown on the Matsys documentation of this SFMOMO installation is innocently captioned, 'Detail of a crease.  Notice the surface texture left by the fabric form.'  Well, yes, we can see the delicate texture of the original knit fabric, but we can also see Weston's photographs of vegetables and nudes  — clearly and purposefully sensual.

Edward Weston, Pepper, 1930; Nude, 1927. Edward Weston negatives, Cole Weston prints.Matsys, P_Wall, 2009. Detail of a crease. Notice the surface texture left by the fabric form.

Concrete canvas

Flame test on an emergency shelter made from a Concrete Canvas kit.

Right.  Concrete.  Here is something called Concrete Canvas, a double layer of tightly knit fabric with cement powder between.  It is flexible, light (5, 8 and 13mm thick), is put in place and then hosed down, forming a thin concrete skin.

It appears to be deployed all over the world for emergency shelters, ditches and water redirection, slope stabilisation and concrete repairs.  Its military applications include reinforcing sandbags and bastions and laying down emergency hard surfaces.  It comes in rolls; it seems magical. The emergency shelters could use some design attention.

They have a kit which includes an inflatable liner attached to a front gable door panel, which is inflated, draped with concrete canvas, watered and is ready in 24 hours.  Other openings can be cut in after it is rigid.  The strength is such that it can then be bermed.

I chose the image above from a vast array on the Concrete Canvas website because it is dramatic, but also shows the texture of the surface.  Unfortunately the inside is lined with the plastic from the inflatable – shiny, maybe sweaty.  Emergency shelter is the operative term. It would be very interesting to see just how far these shells could be adapted for permanent use. 

Miguel Fisac: encofrado flexible

Miguel Fisac's own studio in Madrid: concrete poured into flexible formwork, 1971.

Miguel Fisac, 1913-2006, patented and used an idea in the late 1960s for polythene and a rigid frame as formwork for concrete, feeling that using wooden boards as shuttering was 'an incorrect texture' with its references to carpentry and organic and familiar wood grain.  Concrete on the other hand was 'a material that was poured in a liquid state, more closely approximating a stream of volcanic lava'. [this from the Fundacion Miguel Fisac and the section 'Epidermal Years']

Diederik Veenendaal, writing about Fisac for a dissertation at ETH Zürich, refers to Paul Galabru's 1964 book Obras de fábrica y metálicas and 'encofrado flexible' (flexible formwork), from which he speculates that Fisac, had he owned this book, would have found it an influence. 

Fisac himself is an influence, clearly in the work of Mark West, who began to use flexible formwork in 1986.  Trust that this kind of material sensuality came from Latin culture. 

Dennis McHarrie: Luck

A tough corrective to the increasing sentimentality that surrounds Remembrance Day memorial discussions, including the parroting of such things as 'they died for our freedom'.  

On the death of his friend, whose defective plane crashed:

Luck

I suppose they'll say his last thoughts were of simple things,
Of April back at home, and the late sun on his wings;
Or that he murmured someone else's name
As earth reclaimed him sheathed in flame.
Oh God! Let's have no more of empty words,
Lip service ornamenting death!
The worms don't spare the hero;
Nor can children feed upon resounding praises of his deed.
'He died who loved to live,' they'll say,
'Unselfishly so we might have today!'
Like hell! He fought because he had to fight;
He died that's all. It was his unlucky night.

found in Victor Selwyn's The Voice of War, Poems of the Second World War.  The Salamander Oasis Trust, 1995

There was a knot of anger in many of the WWII veterans that many of us grew up with.  They felt that no one quite got it, but they couldn't explain how the war had changed them.  They went off after grade 11, the lucky ones came back at 22, shocked and not allowed to show it, so they just got on with things.  But this is what they knew:

Crashed Mosquito, Belgium 1944

Herbert Corby: Reprisal

Imperial War Museum, WO201-2023 Middle East - dummy vehicles filling up with fuel, 1942

Reprisal

They worked all night with cardboard and with wood
to make those dummy planes to hoodwink the foe,
and in the chilly morning solitude
wheeled out the dummies to places they should go
on the dispersal fields, and went away;
the hours passed uneventfully, and even
no reconnaissance planes were overhead that day.
They evacuated in the twilight, just after seven
and when they'd gone the Germans flew above the drome
and by each plane they dropped a wooden bomb.


Corby was an RAF Armourer in a bomber squadron.  The poem is part of the operations leading up to the Battle of el Alamein, 1942.  Did it happen?  This is a poem.  Like the fabled Christmas Truce in the First World War, often written about in poem and song, this is the Second World War's registration of some sort of common humanity that renders the act of battle so much more inexplicable.

Isabelle Hayeur: in the middle of nowhere

L'île, 1998, Paysages incertains / Uncertain Landscapes, 107 cm X 244 cm / 42" X 96"

Isabelle Hayeur:  Au milieu de nulle part

As part of Paris Photo at the Canadian Cultural Centre
5, rue de Constantine 75007 Paris
November 14, 2012 to March 22, 2013
Opening reception on November 13, 6h30 pm

From Isabelle Hayeur's press release:

"in the middle of nowhere", which, come to think of it, raises the idea of a strange encounter between geometry and geography. A paradoxical expression that has a wide range of connotations (from irony to poetry, from disenchantment to contemplation), it is used to refer to an object or a place from a relatively unplaceable space. Here, photography demonstrates its power to represent space-time continuums outside our everyday world, outside its flux, noise and inattention. The subjects seem to be uprooted, deprived of rooting in nature, of links to the earthly continuum. For Pascal Grandmaison, Isabelle Hayeur and Thomas Kneubühler, the framing is a crucial process that proposes another way of dividing up reality to take us elsewhere. Not towards some form of exoticism but, on the contrary and more colloquially, to the middle of nowhere.

« Au milieu de nulle part » est une expression qui pointe une chose ou un emplacement isolé, qui sort de l'ordinaire ou qui fait saillie de manière inopinée à partir de l'immensité plane. Littéralement une situation insituable – une absurdité, un paradoxe, une tromperie, un leurre, un éclat – qui représente un objet fabuleux pour la photographie. Les photographes Pascal Grandmaison, Isabelle Hayeur et Thomas Kneubühler, réunis ici pour la première fois, ont en commun cet intérêt manifeste pour ce qui n'est pas censé être au centre de l'attention. Par le cadrage photographique ils proposent un autre découpage du réel pour nous emmener ailleurs. Non pas vers quelque forme d'exotisme mais, bien au contraire et plus familièrement, « Au milieu de nulle part ».

Isabelle Hayeur: Castaway

CASTAWAY from Isabelle Hayeur on Vimeo.

29th Kassel Documentary Film and Video Festival
11.13.12 - 11.18.12 | Kassel

Une vidéo expérimentale filmée dans les eaux incertaines du plus grand cimetière de bateaux de la côté Est de l'Amérique. Situés près de la Chemical Coast du New Jersey et de l'ancien dépotoir Fresh Kills, ces rivages désormais toxiques ont été le théâtre de nombreux désastres écologiques

An experimental video filmed in the murky waters of Witte's Marine Salvage at Staten Island (New York). Located near New Jersey's Chemical Coast and the former Fresh Kills landfill, these now toxic shores have seen their share of ecological disasters.