The work examines the notion of weight through its integration into urban infrastructure and its material formations. The work registers by placing weight within the city, compelling it to engage with the logics of abstraction that govern urban life. There is no intention in taking any stance in critiquing or admiring the abstraction of the city as such. The chosen location is a vacant rooftop on a shopping complex adjacent to the city’s mobility: the metro line.
The weight that will be composed is considered a dead weight or, within the language of the city’s abstraction, understood as an inert mass of the object that is dysfunctional. But the dead weight this load introduces gains its life precisely through its refusal to align with those abstractions. The placement of weight is intended to determine which weight is allowed to remain and how the city will register and encounter it in time. The weight is transferred by placing a newly cast concrete column horizontally on a metal support on a rooftop. As previously mentioned, the rooftop is adjacent to the metro line. The concrete column is positioned slightly tilted, inexplicably hovering above a small rooftop, doing nothing. A brief, few-second view of the column's non-belonging posture will be visible to metro commuters in only one direction during the ride. Becoming the only way to look at the column in reality. Though the only property owner and the people working in the shopping complex can, on any day, take a ladder, climb it, and see it.
The load may appear to a viewer on the metro line as having arrived by necessity, but it does not explain what that necessity is. The weight is intended to persist on the rooftop, subject to displacement or deformation through the city’s economic and infrastructural pressures, or through the decision of the property owner. In parallel, the work involves approaching government, museums, and cultural institutions to consider whether this weight—already present and undeniable—can be acknowledged, assumed, or relocated. Until then, it is permitted to remain in the city, on the rooftop, and age in time along with the other factors associated with it.
Rather than treating weight as an interface or metaphor, the work presents weight as a question—addressed on a surface (a rooftop) that was never meant to respond to it. The framing occurs here with the Metro, dead load in the form of a concrete column, and a rooftop, all part of the city's infrastructure that gathers and disperses, nurtures and erases, and becomes the site of contradiction. The rooftop of an old shopping complex and the metro here become a complementary yet vital junction that meditates on the contrast between the horizontal mobility a city demands for labour and the static vertical futures it induces. In all this flux, the question I am interested in is which weights are allowed to persist and be visible. What kind of load is permitted and considered as progress, and what loads are inherently dismissed and made invisible in the city? One day, the property owner may want this load removed to construct a new building. In such a situation, the column's life would be left to the city's procedural authorities. The load or the column, which is the element of the circuit that runs the capital now, and in most cases concealed inside the walls, or stands in the background although exposed structurally, now becomes one outside of the capital's time and becomes suspended on a city’s own rooftop. It's becoming floating now.
Requests to institutions and cultural bodies to carry this weight or participate in its acceptance are made through formal dialogue. The intention is not to determine whether acceptance arrives, but to examine the dialogue this will prompt when a dead weight is asked to be handled. How would the institution process the acceptance or decline of dead weight? What are the changes the institution has to consider to accept the weight, either physical or procedural? Here, the weight becomes a site of negotiation. What is the friction this weight creates? Or does it become just a dead element to be drawn back to the background? Essentially, the column now being brought forth is an encounter with the excess that is always there and repressed.
The city, which often measures its efficiency by the load it can place on the particular ground and its functional derivatives. The city frames who can own the land and the weight it bears, and the rest is forced outward toward the periphery, only to be attracted, mobilized, toward the center, and then back to the periphery. The city's load is meant to gravitate bodies, labour, and time, all converging to create the city's density. Specific loads are considered part of development and the improvement of life; however, the same load can sometimes become a burden on the body and on life. The specific concrete load exists in the asking and in the refusal. The load/column stand is in a non-functional, unused state of weight within the capital time.
The gesture of placing the weight becomes a key lens through which I approach a negotiation with weight in history. The incision the column introduces into the land through a concrete load is, for me, a comparable act of placing weight back onto the city’s abstraction.
What I draw attention to is the ground itself—a surface marked by volatile histories, accumulated pressures, and the latent capacity to reorganize according to its own temporal logic. Here, the placement of the column is a rift created in the ground, associated with latent capacity. Between the ground and the sky, the city’s infrastructure and economy unfold, negotiating their claims and entitlements across this vertical axis. The city’s abstraction occupies this in-between space, sustained by circulation, mobility, and capital, often detached from the material and historical conditions of the bodies that enact it. The placement of weight—precise, deliberate, and unproductive—functions as an incision directed at the very head of the city’s consciousness. It asks how a city, produced through transactional logics and infrastructural efficiency, encounters a load that refuses circulation, utility, or return. How does the city see, absorb, resist, or displace a weight that insists on grounding itself within its abstractions?
The work intends to make visible the fact that city’s abstraction has always depended on never carrying the burden it organizes.“What happens if abstraction is even asked to register weight?”It forces abstraction to momentarily confront the fact that it exists by never carrying the burden it organizes.“The weight in the work is not symbolic; it tests whether abstraction can bear even a fraction of the historical burdens it has long displaced onto certain bodies.” For me, the column here becomes a site that, in history, stands without being circumscribed by capital and caste time. A movement from vertical to horizontal suspension of the column without any intentional direction, but to take a floating stance.