Troubled Land
Troubled Land/ London Studio, 2022/23
How Are Things?
A Philosophical Experiment with Unremarkable Objects (During the course of one year Roger-Pol Droit assigned himself an experiment: to keep a cross-border record of his meeting with unremarkable things …
A table is not a thing so much as a thing-word. It has no single use, but a multitude of uses. It is the thing which most clearly marks, at least in the west, the constitution of human space. Instead of eating and working on the ground, or on their knees, humans have labored to establish a flat and uniform surface, raised, parallel with the ground-a sound ground, so to speak, at the level of our activities.
The table is an intermediate surface, which gets us off the ground but maintains our link to the ground; which parallels the natural world with a human plane.
‘Constitutive of human space’
Troubled Land/ 2022/23
A coffee table structure stands in for a troubled landscape as a recording of ideas on the scale of domestic furniture; polite objects that ritualise/fetishise social interaction and those bodies that gather around them. The installation sits somewhere between performance, architecture and the body.
A miniaturised model rotates off a black surface at random timed intervals; a direct reference to a previous artwork Kearney has shown in 1992 at the Serpentine Gallery in the heart of London. Originally conceived as a monumental castle temporally obstructing and revealing the space as it rotated at timed intervals within the gallery walls. It was constructed out of corrugated galvanised steel roofing sheets, in reference to barricade material used by the British Army at border crossings between Northern and Southern Ireland during the ‘Troubles’. ‘The Troubles’ also known as the ‘Northern Ireland Conflict’ refers to the three-decade conflict between nationalists and unionists. The word "troubles" has been used as a synonym for violent conflict for centuries.
The table is constructed of aluminium scaffolding, a disc of black cast concrete and a 3D-printed miniature castle, unease in its materiality and scale, hovers while rotating on the edge of the abyss, with its fortress-like exterior and an entombed structure within. Meanwhile, one of the aluminium table legs is elongated, cocked over the table surface, beside a cylinder of helium, tubed up to an illuminated weather balloon, within its lux level reacting to climate conditions from an unrelated location. Secured to this same leg is a public trash holder rim with a clear plastic bag that blows in the air by a little fan, like a flag at half-mast, waiting!
