High-Rise Terminal

High Rising Blues, 2019
Single channel video
Full HD 1080p, colour, silent, 16:9, 3′ 17”, loop

The exhibition High Rise Terminal is a project that comprehends a wall painting - l’unité Fermée (the closed unit); a single-channel video High Rising Blues and an installation Nach Oben
(upward). All works made in 2019.

The starting point of this project was the video High Rising Blues, which represents a video montage of the Blues Point Tower, a building located in Sydney and designed by the Austrian-Australian architect Harry Seidler, a building that was built in a time when modern architecture, made by consecrated architects, had a utopian intent to design good quality building for habitation, with aesthetic and functional concerns. In this video the tower can be seen cut, flipped, duplicated and framed on a horizontal axis in a way that looks vaguely like some strange flying vehicle that took off from McMahons Point, probably, to escape from the criticism that this building has received since its construction.

Like the High Rising Blues video, the wall painting and the installation are conceived, each one of them, with a dual structure, like a diptych. There’s a dialogue between two forms and ideas, like a symmetrical system that puts together two modules: horizontal and vertical; land and sky; abstraction and symbol; closure and opening; contemporaneity and modernism; Australia and internationalism. They also are set as two possible different references about Harry Seidler’s work, as a modernist architect. An architectural project from Le Corbusier and a Josef Albers painting appear in this exhibition as ghosts, as figures of a lost age of modernity when architecture in the service of society doubled as a tool to shape it.
Within this set of works lies a free association of different ideas and different forms that work together as a whole, having the Blues Point Tower as a centre of references.