Their Own Devices

Vladimir Miller works as an artist, researcher, and scenographer. His former work questioned the architectural stability paradigm by using fragility as a building principle. Currently he works with the materiality of fluids and the ways in which they merge and mix, penetrate, seep through and enter where they are not supposed to go. They challenge our ideas of borders and stability and seem to carry with them their own ways of negotiating and producing territories.

Contemporary architecture is formed much like the landscape it is claiming its territory from: by solidifying a fluid. Fluid concrete is contained and its flow and shape are managed until it settles into pillars and floors. As architecture it now serves to order, support, and contain all kinds of formless aggregates, regulating gatherings and solitudes, keeping the unwanted out. Rain flows down, water is provided through pipes, fluids leave the building in orderly fashion — they too are something that architecture is built to exclude, to control, and to regulate. Leaks, spills, water seeping through walls and ceiling are small catastrophes, not only to the building itself but to the very paradigm of what architecture is supposed to be. A stain is a blooming proof of something having gone awry. A fluid out of control is a breakdown not only of physical structure, but of the institutional too. It calls for a collective effort of maintenance, for a sorting of the elements back into order. Fluids and the ways in which they merge, mix, penetrate, seep through, and enter where they are not supposed to go challenge our ideas of borders and stability. Fluids seem to carry with them their own ways of negotiating and producing territories, ways that are foreign to us, ways which go against our concepts of body, conflicts, and permanence.

Text by Vladimir Miller

The installation Their Own Devices is on show at Akademie Schloss Solitude March 10, 2016 – April 24, 2016.