Today, we are going to visit an exhibition that has not yet been produced.
The exhibition has not been installed, and the list of works has not been finalized. Strangely enough, however, it feels as though we have already passed through that space many times.
We travel for more than a day to see this exhibition. On the plane we watch about six films, then run for a long time along a runway swept by sandstorms. Around midday, we unpack at our lodging and head together to the exhibition hall, a fifteen-minute walk away.
A thick film of pale dust has settled on the building’s full glass windows, making it difficult to see inside. Someone writes “Columns” across the surface with a finger. Column: derived from the Latin columna, meaning pillar. Beyond the glass, light passing through the word faintly spreads across the dim exhibition walls.
In ancient Greek and Roman architecture, repeated cylindrical columns were structures that supported buildings. The reason opinion pieces in newspapers and magazines are called “columns” is likewise due to their vertical form on the printed page. Sentences connected horizontally stack layer upon layer, forming a pillar that sustains a single thought. Perhaps this exhibition addresses the formation of such pillars—and states of sedimentation and erosion.
Upon entering, there is a plinth to the left of the entrance. Normally an exhibition guide would sit atop it, but there is nothing. It is unclear whether something has been forgotten or whether the exhibition refuses explanation from the outset.Inside the space, several structures rise from the floor. Their organic forms resemble stalagmites in a cave. The floor is covered with broken plaster tiles, and with each step, fragments shatter into smaller pieces.
On the left, 4:3 ratio CRT televisions are stacked, each facing a different direction. The lower screens loop an animation reminiscent of Hope for the Flowers—a massive heap of caterpillars climbing atop one another. The upward motion is evident, but up close it seems less like ascent and more like a state of maintenance, postponing collapse. On the screens above, dashcam footage repeatedly shows the collapse of a bridge pier from multiple angles.
On the right side stand columns composed of packaging materials and construction debris. Bubble wrap, plastic wrap, box tape, electric wires, hoses, gypsum boards, broken tiles, garbage bags, and Euro pallets are entangled together, barely maintaining their form through tape and wrapping. The materials shimmer briefly in their own temporality and ephemerality as they stand upright. These columns appear not as results of accumulation, but as states just before collapse—temporarily deferred.
On one tall wall, text written in hot-melt adhesive has hardened as though it had dripped downward. It is the full text of Jorge Luis Borges’s “On Exactitude in Science.” One of us reads it aloud:
“In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such perfection that the map of a single Province occupied an entire City, and the map of the Empire, an entire Province. In time, these Excessive Maps no longer satisfied, and the Colleges of Cartographers produced a Map of the Empire that was the size of the Empire itself and coincided with it point for point.Less devoted to the study of Cartography, later generations understood that this vast Map was useless and, not without impiety, abandoned it to the harshness of the Sun and the Winters. In the deserts of the West, tattered ruins of the Map still endure, inhabited by animals and beggars; throughout the entire Country, there remains no other relic of the Geographical Disciplines.
Suárez Miranda, Travels of Prudent Men, Book Four, Chapter XLV, Lérida, 1658.”
The surface of the melted and hardened glue feels less like written sentences and more like traces of sediment. We speculate on what part of this story—the creation of a map the same size as the empire, only to abandon it—the exhibition pays homage to.
The exhibition offers no particular conclusion. The works simply stand in the same space, each maintaining its own height. We stand before different columns, observing them from various angles. The different pillars neither fully support one another nor are they completely separate; they share the same time.
As we exit the dark exhibition hall, the 3 p.m. sunlight pours onto the asphalt. And yet, beneath our feet, it still feels as if tiles are breaking. Someone says, “Look over there.” When we turn around, the place where the exhibition once stood is already covered by the exterior wall of another building.
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