La Donna Delinquenta
1987
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| Photo sourced from Martha Fleming |
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| Photo sourced from Marth Fleming |
These artists choose abandoned or forgotten sites for all of their installations to be set up in. They do so based on the fact that the buildings are charged with meaning; social, emotional, ideological, and economical. For the work La Donna Delinquenta (1987) that took place in Montreal, Canada the artists chose to use a space within a theatre that had been abandoned for 20 years.
The works itself explored representations of women and the title, having been taken from a text from the nineteenth century, describing the innate criminality of the female gender, forced the viewer to view the work with that mindset.
The thing that I found so interesting about the works by these artists was that they were placing them in an environment that they knew would play so heavily in the viewing of the work itself. The environment would create a dialogue with the viewer, the installation would create a dialogue with the viewer, and the installation within the environment would create a dialogue with the viewer.
On the artist's website I found this quote:
In our projects for and with abandoned buildings, we work with the complex psychic fabric left as a kind of palimpsest or veneer on the structure itself. The material which we manipulate is in fact not so much the building per se as its psychic history, which is of course the thread that weaves buildings into and out of a living and magnetically contradictory social history mapped out onto the urban fabric. Every building is a memory theatre and retains a psychic and emotional aura gleaned from the passage of all those who may have come between its walls, and this elastic umbilicus is firmly anchored in the memory which those people retain of their passage. A boarded-up building is an embodiment of the unconscious. It is also a reminder of the failure of capitalism. The projects themselves, in lifting the veil on these buildings and the denied unconscious inside them, create an unforgettable punctum in the urban narrative. They are sites of the possible. Armed only with a conviction of the primacy of our shared psychic experience of space, without any tool or intent to construct, without the will or the capacity to puncture and alter, to restore or recycle, we briefly inhabit, reinvest with social meaning, and render accessible to a large public abandoned buildings which resonate within their communities; involving ourselves, the buildings, and these communities in a discursive activity which fuses our experience of mediated space with other complexly related social issues.
This is so interesting to read considering the installation that my group and I are preparing for. When I think about the spaces in the city I think of 2 types of spaces; utilised and abandoned. The space that we have chosen is interesting because it is located within a section of the city where the rest of the spaces are utilised. It is a space that has somehow seemingly become abandoned whilst being surrounded by functional spaces. This gives a meaning to the space; it is representative of the way a city can be fast-paced and unforgiving, that if you do not keep up then you will be left behind. I like this idea a lot.
The artist discusses the way that they use the buildings within the works:
Armed only with a conviction of the primacy of our shared psychic experience of space, without any tool or intent to construct, without the will or the capacity to puncture and alter, to restore or recycle, we briefly inhabit, reinvest with social meaning, and render accessible to a large public abandoned buildings which resonate within their communities; involving ourselves, the buildings, and these communities in a discursive activity which fuses our experience of mediated space with other complexly related social issues.
I am drawn to the way that the artist describes the use of the space. They are temporary inhabitants, there to invest into their works social meaning and context, to give the viewer a opportunity to venture into these spaces that they would otherwise not. Thinking about our installation I find this notion interesting particularly as the space can be seen in clear view from the street but is hardly accessed. The installation draws people into the space, one that they may have passed by dozens of times, and allows them to experience it from the other side of the fence, an experience that I myself found completely different to just looking in from the outside.
I can really appreciate the ideas that these artists had regarding their choice to install their works within these abandoned spaces and find that their notions of space and interpretations as a result of it are extremely important.
Quotes sourced from
Martha Fleming. 2014. http://www.marthafleming.net/la-donna-delinquenta/
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