Arkadiusz Piegdon – Claire Kao – Da vi Weber – Diego Rodriguez – Harry Byron – Jaclyn Jung – Jim Stoddart – Mondrian Hsieh – Sissily Harrell – Taylor Miller – Tianhui Shen – Vahe Markosian
 

Invited to install an exhibition in the sculptural space of the “Orbe New York” at Palais de Tokyo, students from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, during a workshop with the visiting artist Tomas Saraceno, aim to create a temporary installation that distorts and amplifies one’s sense of self within the confines of the exhibition space. This installation re-positions the ever-evolving boundaries between sculpture and architecture as it dares to redefine the spatial relationships between the two.
 

She ate a little bit, and said anxiously to herself, `Which way? Which way?’, holding her hand on the top of her head to feel which way it was growing, and she was quite surprised to find that she remained the same size: to be sure, this generally happens when one eats cake, but Alice had got so much into the way of expecting nothing but out-of-the-way things to happen, that it seemed quite dull and stupid for life to go on in the common way.

Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll

The inflated landscape demands an atypical slowness, heightening awareness of one’s body in relation to the displacement and resulting disruption of the field. The shifting terrain above and below induce a loss of scale, or rather a loss of consistency of scale. Navigating the foreign landscape, the traveller grows and shrinks in the shifting space, diminishing to miniature and growing so large to the point of bursting through the stratosphere. No paths are preordained, and in any direction one finds provocation and awareness of others, questioning the difference between the sensible and nonsensical. A field of reflections above and below invites the traveller to lose himself in a space where one can never be lost, always in sight of a thousand uncanny versions of his own visage.

Going Away taps into an innate desire for escape, a jealousy of helium’s ability to leave the confines of our atmosphere while we remain bound by gravity. While the dissolution of the perfect spherical shapes illustrates loss, they also speak to the excitement and anticipation of transitioning into a new state of self. The remnants of Going Away will be preserved and compressed in a box to be launched to the cosmos, in pursuit of the helium that has escaped it and to allow for its reconstruction in the future.

The exhibition is presented by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). GSAPP is pleased to introduce the inaugural 2013 Paris Atelier “Lighter than Air” with Visiting Artist Tomas Saraceno. The Paris Atelier is hosted at Columbia Global Centers | Europe (Reid Hall, Paris) as a five-year research initiative made possible through the Laboratory for Applied Building Science (LABS) in association with Architect Asaf Gottesman, co-founding partner. The 2013 installation Going Away was constructed under the consultation and expert advice of LABS Director Phillip Anzalone and Architect Michel Serratrice.