Making Ruins III
Exhibition view, Sabine Bitter & Helmut Weber:
Making Ruins, Republic Gallery Vancouver
November 15, 2019—February 8, 2020
The photographic spatial installation Making Ruins consists of a black and white wallpaper of a city view of Macedonian capital city of Skopje in 2015. The enlarged image is combined with a series of various sized panels and with four framed urban details – “Making Ruins #1 – #4” which relate to the city´s historic and current situations of urban restructuring processes. These photographic fragments of architectures by Kenzo Tange and Janko Konstantinov deal with the heritage of the Japanese architect Kenzō Tange and his plan to rebuild Skopje after the 1963 earthquake.
The photographs of the last remains of Kenzō Tange´s and Janko Konstantinov´s buildings point to the corpses of architecture which got threatened to disappear under a foamy camouflage of a thick layer of fictitious history. To counter the false narrative constructed from an imagined antiquity of a nationalist governmental endeavour called the Skopje 2014 program, the artistic intervention reworks the still visible architectural remains into ruins, acting to interrupt the linearity of false historization of the architectural fabric of the city, preserving memories of a particular moment of past international solidarity and claiming an alternative future for Skopje.