Art Omi, New York
I.THE MARABOUT
Draa Valley, Morocco
How does the Foreign Reveal The Familiar ?
Form
The marabout is a funerary monument of southern Morocco. Its form results from the composition of two elementary geometires : The square and the circle. The cube, rooted in the ground, embodies the human dimension and terestrial grounding. The sphere represents the absolute in mystical thoughts, from Parmenides to the Sufi tradition. The octagon, by rotation and intersection of square and circle, mediates between earth and sky.
Erosion
Decay
It did not survive unchanged. Climate, gravity, abandonment, the accelerating pace of a world it was never built for these operators worked on it slowly, then all at once. It eroded, fragmented, dissolved.
Continuity
But its fragments persist. They carry a grammar a set of rules for how form mediates between earth and sky, between the human and the sacred. That grammar migrates.
II. Resurection – The Silo of Art Omi
It reconstituted itself here, inside a silo in the Hudson Valley. A different material, a different continent, the same spatial logic: a vertical element at the center, a circular enclosure around it. The visitor moves around the column as one moves around the Kaaba a circumambulation without doctrine, a ritual without a name.
The Silo is an agricultural infrastructure of the Hudson Valley – cylindrical, corrugated steel, built for storage, now emptied of its function. It too is a kind of ruin.
Protocol for constructing a NeoRuin
Scan. Read the site through its materiality: excavated earth, standing columns, soil, stone, metal. What exists before anything is introduced.
Catalogue. Earth blocks. Threaded rods. Stone fragments. Each material carries its own time, its own logic of transformation.
Graft. The threaded rod passes through the earth block : the industrial holds the vernacular without merging with it. A ruin inside a ruin. The foreign reveals the familiar. The familiar absorbs the foreign.
A ruin inside a ruin. The foreign reveals the familiar. The familiar absorbs the foreign.
