OFLUXO

Toward the center right of the field there is a slight mound, a swelling in the wood delineating a structure extruded at different heights.1 Each stepped layer traces the topography of an excavation. Instead of descending into a subterranean pit, the wooden structure protrudes above ground level in the form of an inverse quarry.

In archaeology, excavation is the exposure, processing and recording of archaeological remains. Excavation unearths objects, the domains of which are determined by an accumulation of sedimentary layers built upon one another according to the passing of time.

In architecture, excavation is the removal of the exposed layer of the earth’s surface to form a level surface on which to build the foundations of a structure to be erected from the ground. This construction functions to create a domain based on the type of activity that will occur within its walls.

In both cases these spatial interventions function as the initial condition through which the raw material of a landscape becomes domain. The wooden structure becomes an architecture of living tissue that expands and contracts with the environment and is given a second life in the structures it becomes. Occupying the thin boundary through which both excavation and construction intersect in the determining of domain, the artworks mimic the action of the whole, decaying from their original material purpose, or constructing a new situation, settling along shifting planes of formative structure.
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Krauss, Rosalind. “Sculpture in the Expanded Field.” October, vol. 8, 1979 p. 31