VI PER Gallery announces winner of an international open call for 2021
In Fall 2020, VI PER Gallery launched an international open call for exhibition projects, in search of an original proposal for an exhibition at the end of 2021. We have received 64 applications from which the jury consisting of Davide Tommaso Ferrando, Samia Henni, Johnny Leya, Monika Platzer, Anna Puigjaner, Tadeáš Říha, and Andi Schmied have selected the following winning project:
Planetary Home Improvement: From Just-in-Time to Geological Time by Christine Giorgio, Amelyn Ng, and Gabriel Vergara.
Their proposal asks, what planetary urgencies, temporalities and extractions undergird products of just-in-time geology? Rewriting shelf life and collapsing the ancient and the instant, their research project takes stock of the terrestrial home via the big-box DIY store, as the home improvement industry continues to boom and propagate rocks in anthropo-convenient forms. The exhibition will examine the geological life of product accumulation, installation, and instruction through both physical and digital gallery artifacts. If the Eames’s Powers of Ten organized the universe by relative scale, Planetary Home Improvement redesignates its earthly substrates by relative temporality—from the planet to the point of sale.
Christine Giorgio is a filmmaker and an architect, who earned her M.Arch from Columbia University. Her films have been recognized internationally and nominated for an Independent Spirit Award.
Amelyn Ng is an architect, educator. She graduated at the CCCP program, Columbia GSAPP, and is currently a Wortham Fellow at the Rice Scholl of Architecture in Houston, Texas.
Gabriel Vergara is an architect and urban designer, who graduated at Columbia GSAPP’s Architecture and Urban Design program. He works at nonprofit Asia Initiatives, New York City.
As Tadeáš Říha—a member of the jury—puts it: “The proposal is playfully connecting the two themes of Anthropocene and DIY building culture. Exploring the timescales and geological histories of everyday building materials opens a world of potentials for theoretical exploration and direct exhibition opportunities. A spatial installation presents the contrast of the mundane everyday building products like plasterboard or Rockwool and the aeons of their geological histories.The project structures the theme in 3 ‘geological’ objects in the main gallery space, in a stud wall lining of the existing dividing wall and a video screening.”
Thanks to everyone who submitted their projects.
