Site: Waterman Gallery

 

City/State: Providence

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Country: USA

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Year: 2023

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Spolia is both a metaphor and a method. It embodies the soul of architecture and design processes, from the interior to the exterior, from the building to the city: juxtaposition, fragmentation, layering, appropriation. The tangible products of human creation are complex and corrupted results of historical collages where reuse, preservation, and musealization are acts of memorialization. The latter are sometimes gradual transitions, sometimes abrupt mutations, sometimes unequal erasures which always leave behind more or less concealed traces of history, spolia that we can decide to see, transform, or silence. 

 

This exhibition begins with a methodology and ends with a metaphor. All materials used to build the exhibition design elements, from the pedestals to the wallpapers, are leftovers or materials used by INTAR’s students over the spring and summer semester, models thrown away or anonymous, and fragments picked up from the trash or from remains of previous exhibits. All those elements have been combined, layered, juxtaposed as spolia of our department’s life and reappropriated memories of an unwritten ephemeral past.

 

The work displayed is a combination of undergraduates and graduate students’ work from Fall 2022 to Summer 2023.