A Matter of Scale [electronic resource].

Rib 2021

Open access content

Scaling is to move across different dimensions: a firm might be scaling down, nearing bankruptcy—its new dimension is to reach rock bottom; a doll house might be a scale model, where dimensions are kept proportional but decreased compared to a real house; a hand touching a map is, to paraphrase Tom Holert, a scaling device, where the graspable dimension of the map makes available the experience of exploring, traveling and possessing lands. For this publication of Taming the Horror Vacui, which includes content from three different sessions in the program, we put the wind and its manifestations through a process of scaling. We navigate across cultural and scientific interpretations of this physical phenomena so central to Ahmed’s practice and his program at Rib, showing how the wind changes dimension in the eye of the beholder. It is small on the anatomical level but it can grow to encompass the city, the planet and even God and the cosmos. Increasingly zooming out, this publication starts with the wind in the body, following up on the breathing exercise organized last May by Leen Scholiers. It continues with a tale from an inhabitant of Charlois in Rotterdam, whose recount of the city’s “resistance” gives a picture of the wind at the urban scale. The artwork of Saadia Mirza, which she presented for Taming the Horror Vacui last April, as well as an original contribution by independent curator Francesco Tenaglia, takes us to the dimension of the planet: the changing climatic conditions of the earth, especially modeled through sound. Lastly, we reach the cosmological dimension of the wind through its symbolism in art and culture, recently exposed by art historian Barbara Baert in her lecture for the program…
https://www.librarystack.org/a-matter-of-scale/?ref=unknown

Climatic changes
Cosmology
Design
Earth sciences
Sculpture

Text

Haseeb Ahmed
Piero Bisello
Francesco Tenaglia
Leen Scholiers
Barbara Baert
Saadia Mirza
Maziar Afrassiabi
Kristin Metho
Linus Bonduelle
Claudia Schouten