Installation view of Salt Works. Photography by Morgan Starkey, 2020.
This sixteenth iteration of the Garage Exchange Vienna-Los Angeles exhibition series, brings together Christoph a. Kumpusch of Forward-slash ( / ) Architektur and artist Youmna Chlala. As urban sites adjust to fluxing climates, we offer extraction as a strategy for uncovering future possibilities. We imagine a process much like desalination where salt is left behind. We consider the sludge. What affect does it have on its original environment? What do the vibrations reveal? What do the patterns foretell? Salt Works proposes a speculative field of what remains.
In Salt Works: Site 1 we begin in a suspended garage-space in Los Angeles. The sounds are under water and earth, taken from within the space itself and from multiple LA typologies and topologies. In the space of the gallery, temporal encounters create new associations as we imagine new ways of moving through the shifting ground. We engage variations of scale including the urban, intimate and infinite. They are absorbed and invented, appear and disappear:
1:100
1:25000
1:20
3:1
1:50
1:500
1:50000
2:1
1:1
1: ∞ …INFINITY (∞), along with its symbol ∞, is not a number and it is not a place. There is no limit to its values. We then say that the values become infinite, or tend to infinity – a limit is a number.
There is no number that we can name.
Artists
christoph a. kumpusch
Christoph a. Kumpusch is a New York-based architect and the Head of Forward Slash ( / ) Architektur, the Co-Founder of the Mutating-Cities Institute and the Director of the Extraction Laboratory at Columbia GSAPP, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, where he teaches Design and Visual Studies in its Architecture and Real Estate programs. Kumpusch was a Leonardo da Vinci Fellow and a Rudolf M. Schindler Scholar, MAK Center Architect in Residence, USAA Scholar, National Collegiate Engineering Award-winner and a 2013 and 2015 Graham Foundation Grantee.
youmna chlala
Youmna Chlala is an artist and a writer whose work investigates the relationship between fate and architecture through drawing, sculpture, prose and performance. She participated in the 33rd Bienal de São Paulo (2018), Lofoten Bienal (2017), Performa Biennial (2011) and has exhibited widely including at the Hayward Gallery, Rotterdam International Film Festival, The Drawing Center, Dubai Art Projects, Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Camera Austria, ICA London, Hessel Museum of Art and Art In General. She is the Co-Director of the Mutating Cities Institute. Her book of poetry, The Paper Camera, is forthcoming by Litmus Press in 2019. She is a Professor in the Humanities & Media Studies and Writing at the Pratt Institute.
