Drawn Territory - Part 1

A Conversation between Helene Kazan & Louise Ashcroft - 2009/10

Louise Ashcroft: Hi Helene, What particularly struck me about the Drawn Territories project that you developed during our Trident Way residency was the contradiction between your instinctive desire to possess space by imposing large sculptural interventions and the fact that these interventions are then somehow deliberately erased or made fragile, as if to confront their own impending disappearance. For example, your polystyrene pillars have an initial appearance of a much more solid, permanent material, which is then dissolved using light and shadow to bring out a ghostly feeling of impermanence inherent in the polystyrene. Similarly, in your animation, you track a process of physically imposing the same material onto a space which you have temporarily occupied (in this case a section of the industrial estate), before removing and relocating it to the time-based space of an animation.

You occupy the site using powerful geometry reminiscent of the architectural structures used to impose power structures on urban space. You then confront this spatial hegemony with its own impending destruction. This process of continual territorialisation and deterritorialisation reminds me very much of the nomadic spatial process advocated by Deleuze and Guattari's 'Treatise on Nomadology', which they use as a metaphor for a politics of 'difference'; a politics free from the hegemonic structures of hierarchical 'striated' space.

Do you see the architectural 'striations' in the Drawn Territories installation, or in your animation works, as symbolic of political power structures? And is this continual process of physical occupation and deterritorialisation, of knocking down and rebuilding, a political gesture? Is this idea is your work related to your experience of architectural destruction and reconstruction in Beirut? Or is it more of a reaction to Western Capitalist forms of spatial dominance visible in London's urban landscape?

Helene Kazan: Hi Louise, I find it really interesting that you have picked up on the territorial and deterritorial nature of my work. Like me, my creative practice has a kind of dual citizenship, on the one hand it is an elegant exploration of the parameters of drawing and sculpture, and on the other is a politically charged investigation into notions of territory, occupancy, space and cultural growth.

In 2006 I read Eyal Weizman’s ‘Hollow Land – Israel’s Architecture of Occupation,’ I became fascinated by the introductory tale of the book which describes how Israel’s now largest outpost in Gaza manifested itself around a fake mobile phone mast. This abstract snapshot of cultural adaptation and growth struck a cord, and I began to use my practice to playfully and practically investigate these concepts of territory and occupancy whilst utilising the no-mans land of the exhibition space. Having moved to England in the 80’s after a childhood in war torn Beirut, my growing awareness and education of the situation in Israel, particularly through continuous media coverage in the winter of 2008, re-awakened an experience I had originally been too young to understand. Aware that there is a clichéd currency in art addressing politics in the Middle East, I’ve decided to avoid this minefield and instead examine the real practicalities of occupying space and territory. This seemed most relevant, as it not only applied to my childhood in Beirut, but to the adaptation of my life once I’d arrived in England, as well as life now in London.

Developing creative methods that were a bastardisation of processes used within architecture, I drew through the exhibition space with massive concrete columns that I referred to as ‘marks’. These monstrous structures were often thought to reference modernist architecture, but actually related to the half built or destructed architecture I’d grown up with in Beirut. Also, although I simply saw these ‘marks’ as a series of three dimensional drawn lines, I became consciously aware of a similar use of columns in many memorials like the Jewish Memorial by Peter Eisenman in Berlin and most recently the 7/7 Memorial designed by Carmody Groarke in Hyde Park. This may have been an unconscious reference initially; however I now believe it reflects a relevant narrative to the work.

With the recent invitation from Departure Gallery to take part in a short three-week residency on Southall’s Trading Estate; followed by the exhibition in one of the trading estates’ vast empty warehouses with 24-hour access to the site and complete freedom of our exhibiting space I got very interested in this situation. When I visited the site for the first time, it became apparent how foreign our presence was to its normal occupants, we as artists were in some way staging a kind of temporary foreign occupation. This became even more fascinating as over the weekends, the entire estate would become deserted. To determine a rule that would give my work a physical boundary I installed my piece (made from a multiple of seven foot polystyrene columns) in one of the normally full car parks for twelve hours on a Saturday. Photographing it every couple of minutes throughout this time to create a stop frame animation. A show I had previously been in called ‘Trash Vortex’ as part of Hackney Wicked, had pushed me to move away from the physicality of materials like concrete, to use other materials and more temporary fluid mediums like animation. The shadows that were created as an effect of my intervention in the car park became a set of coordinates I could use and recreate in the gallery to give an imagined site-specific border to the work. I agree that the apparent contradiction between my instinctive desire to possess space by imposing large sculptural interventions and then deliberately erasing or making them fragile, is an influx process of territorialisation and deterritorialisation.

Continued...

Louise Ashcroft, Curator, Departure Gallery.

View full published article in LMReview06.