Stones of Teeth

Site specific installation at RAW Gallery of Architecture and Design, Winnipeg, MB.
Opening event for Architecture Fringe Festival, Winnipeg MB, 2014.
Part of Royal Architecture Institute of Canada (RAIC) Festival of Architecture, 2014. 

Year: 2014

Team: Anca Matyiku and Chad Connery with soundscape by Sarah Shin

Publications:
The Cambridge Architecture Journal: SCROOPE 26, 2017.
The Expanding Periphery, the Migrating Center: ACSA 103rd Annual Meeting Conference Proceedings, 2015.

The site-specific installation was inspired-by and conspired-with the Nordic creation myth described in Snorri Sturluson’s The Prose Edda. The principal sensibility distilled from the Edda is a sense that materials and objects, whether at geological or microscopic level, are seldom inert. The strategy for the work was to bring processes of change—not unlike those that occur in buildings, cities, and landscapes over much longer stretches of time—within the observable time frame of human perception. Thus conceived, the work emerged as a human made landscape with creature-inclinations; an orchestration of chemical interchanges between solids, metals, fluids, precipitates and the substance of salt in particular. The specific artifacts of Stones of Teeth were crafted with “anticipatory qualities”—meaning that they were incomplete and would continue to form themselves once they left the direct influence of the human hand. Such objects were to dissolve, deposit, sprout, warp, precipitate in unpredictable ways that satisfied the predilections of their material composition. The underlying motive was to probe the made artifacts to contribute their own stories to the work. 

Photos by Stationpoint Photographic