Dwelling for the spirits

Part of the exhibition «Circle of the Indescribable» presented by «Factura 10» and RIBBON International in collaboration with Jam Factory Art Center, in Dim42 — with Janina Pedan and Anna-Mariia Kucherenko, curated by Marta Kuzma.

Together with Janina Pedan we built this pink room accompanied by Walter Benjamin's line «ornaments are dwelling for spirits». We created a ghostly room within a room: mystical walls inhabited by spirits peel away from the historic walls of the building. I took the original ornamentation of the room as a basis and reworked it with other symbols — I made the ornaments, Janina created the form on which they lay.

This space is a ghost of an interior where spirits dissolve into ornaments, break their form and leave behind traces. Spectral walls, seemingly unpeeled from the real ones, immerse us into a realm of the otherworldly and the secretive. Emerging from memory and functioning as memory itself, it is something impossible to grasp — a membrane stretched between recollection and presence. Here ornaments invade the familiar order of things, breaking themselves and stumbling over the fleeting nature of time.

Kent Bloomer noted that the word ornament derives from the Latin ornare, related to the Greek kosmos — the universe, order. The ancient Greeks contrasted kosmos with chaos. In this room, a mirror of the past, both remain in one space with the present: once the cosmic elements banished chaos and revealed order, now they accept each other's simultaneity and destabilise the fixed nature of things.

We enter into a dialogue with Adolf Loos's ideas on ornament and crime, but turn the assertion on its head: what if it is not a crime, but a trace? Not an embellishment, but the language of spirits? What if the architectural plan came alive in a dream and filled itself with demons?