CURA.

With Polvere, Lydia Ourahmane reveals Ordet as a site of material production, as well as probing its spatial and physical potential. A wooden pathway, built with repurposed material, the residue of Ordet’s past programs, traverses the gallery. Matter never disappears: it moves, it mutates—mostly, it lingers. In a further act of disclosure, a section of the drywall that used to conceal the storage from the exhibition area now lays flat down on the floor. The exhibition mines and transforms all that Ordet has been and has made.
Just like it acknowledges the space in which it’s taking place, the exhibition only really reveals itself when a visitor moves within it.

In echolocation, sound waves are emitted to understand space by assessing the contours of a clearing. A gunshot is the extremity of what can be deployed—and of what can be perceived. The echo is the aftermath of an impulse. In the quarry, the impulse employed was a blank pistol traditionally used to train dogs out of the fear of the sound. The shots are repeated until the dog is no longer distressed, and is able to obey beyond its instinct to run.

In Polvere, the echo is a measurement of human intervention. That recorded void now observes each individual visitor at Ordet, acutely foregrounding their participation as a live transmission. In the presence of visitors, the pathway triggers the impulse, the space accommodates the echo, and the echo plays the role of the witness.
The exhibition space appears altered, but nothing visible has been added, nothing has been removed, and nothing will be discarded. At the end of the show, the exposed drywall will be reduced to dust, its original material state, and recast in the interior of the pathway transforming its sections into sculptures, an index of all that was repurposed.