The Illuminating Shadows and The Daylight Metric Of Texas , 2014
at the show Site Of A Future Trailer Park, DAI link here
Marfa - Texas.
Is this place a crime scene of history? A monument or a ruin?
A place for commemoration and honour or revenge?
Can this object be read as a ruin by holding “two opposing tendencies of ruination and edification, of life and death”?
What did I do there? As I am not from there, I landed as a cultural alien-tourist.
I read that land we stood on - as a physical space - as a compass. I observed the celestial connections. ... Did I map and dominate this space by my metric and quantifiable relation to the ground? During daylight the conscious and disciplinary way of measuring didn’t allow a mirage to reveal – far away from planetary mysticism. Moonlight worked differently. Do those images reveal the connection between people with a natural territory? The function and meaning this land had for whom?
What can I call those places? Crime Scenes of History? Monuments? Ruins? A place for commemoration and honour or revenge? Does this object read as a ruin by holding “two opposing tendencies of ruination and edification, of life and death”? (Sadek) Or can I name them by their former function? 'The hospital building of the Army Camp in Marfa, Texas.' ....“The Spring Camp in the National Park Guadalupe Mountain where the ‘Buffalo Soldiers’ defeated the last Apache stronghold in Texas…”?
Or as places where the moon and the sun met the line… where the fleeting nature of the illuminating shadow was signalled…
Anneke Ingwersen, November 2014
