Allen Tombello
Plot 433 Bernard Street
The gesture occurring within the Plot is an addition of a thin sheet of chaulk powder, which stimulates both a depth and breadth, an accretion of meaning as well as consideration of oppositions of time, use and identity. An artist is going rhizomatic here. Uncanny in its presence, the diaphanous layer of chalk powder is spread within the parameters of the former foundation. The powder creates a flat depthless plane out of nonexistent floor plan of the demolished residence. The chalk marks and ghosts the zone of "the once was," forcing us to reconsider the demolished house's absence. The powder plane within the lot overlaps the desire path. When people who use the desire path cross through the chalk, the path will be redrawn and their traffic will extend the boundaries of the plane beyond the bounds of the lot on to sidewalks and streets. When a participant crosses this through the plot they recreate a temporal spacial plane. Participants cross and join through from one type of time, use, and meaning to another, thereby encouraging the sustained suture of contrarieties along an enlightened plane and path of flows: a relational specificity.
An empty lot is a negative space that hovers between a barren plane, an area already congesting with activity, and a site where a future structure is in abeyance. The land includes scars, traces and ghostings. The state of affairs of the land - the flattened bleached earth, its markings, inscriptions and phenomena - form a site a where various forces and confluences play out. The site orientated installation of plot begs questions: Does the body of land, like the figure, retain a memory of the other? The scars where development has left its inscription inform past as well as present identity. Is there some texture of thereness lost or local fabric unseamed by the foreclosure and demolition of the structure? The structure is certainly retained in the memory of those who used it, just as the land clearly retains the stirration of geology and the bruises of construction. While the plot now shows the practical face of the deterritorialized site, literally flattened to ease the play in the board game of property and capital, it is already beginning to host new flows and possibly the beginnings of new networks.