Space Can’s title is taken from the artist’s statements on space that punctuate the book. Paging through, the reader is party to a meditation on disappearing architecture, on preservation or destruction, on utility and decoration, and on whole objects and fragments. And if the remnant of a beam eaten by insects can encapsulate the whole building from which it was taken, this publication condenses both an exhibition and an ongoing artistic practice.
Space Can… opens and closes entering and leaving Augustas Serapinas’ winter exhibition at Tschudi gallery in the Engadin village of Zuoz in 2023. Serapinas’ exhibition filled the spaces of the medieval Chesa with buildings of a different vernacular. The shingles of a roof covered a stone wall, a whole A-frame roof occupied one gallery, and a structure assembled from massive, crossed beams rose up to meet the building’s own beams in the tallest space. Found elements from Lithuanian buildings that had been destined for destruction became sculpture – or at least something less architectural – in an art context. Decorative but functional shutters became relief works and ceramic ovens stood alone, akin to empty plinths. The buildings that Serapinas worked with in this exhibition are of a disappearing rural type, one which has largely become outmoded. They differ in wood used and the methods of crafts employed in the Swiss building; little more than a chance of fate allows one building to be carefully restored while others are dismantled. Nevertheless, by relocating the Lithuanian building parts and re-framing them in a Swiss gallery, the artist enables them to communicate unexpected significance.
That exhibition’s title Wood and Snow is echoed in the publication’s material, which documents the exhibition on interleaved pages of white and unbleached fibre. The reader gains two perspectives on the objects when the same image is printed using distinct processes. It is unmistakably the same piece, yet appears quite different. Thus the publication undermines both the idea of a neutral space in which to exhibit objects, and photography as a means to document what an object looks like. Reality is not what we see in either image, but somewhere in between. -Publisher
