Blind spot
2021
Two-part ceramic object, wire, epoxy resin.
The object was develoved during the “Nature in the city. Non-human Heterotopias” Lab within the framework of the Nordic Countries Festival, the “Kunsthalle nummer Sieben” Gallery, St. Petersburg.
In urban environments, human presence is secured by layers of infrastructure—calibrated systems of order, enclosure, and predictability. Even natural vegetation must obey the logic of maintenance, being trimmed, bordered, and channeled. Within this grid, what is unclassified and out of bounds becomes noticeable.
Wild vegetation asserting itself through tiny cracks and margins registers with utility systems as unwanted, not because of its form, but because of its refusal to conform. It bypasses zoning, ignores ownership, and proliferates without permission. Such presences are met with anxiety and are perceived less as species than as indistinct masses and therefore alien.
What defines the boundary between the industrial and the personal? Is it rigid by necessity, or has the city merely conditioned us to fear that which resists familiar classification? Reducing the complex, entangled, or unintelligible into a singular, alien abstraction suppresses difference in favor of the regulated.
However, in doing so, are we not reproducing a deeper standardization that flattens both the foreign and the self into mutually incomprehensible surfaces
