Sample Sampling
This project is part of the larger body of work, Residing in Ruin. It entails a material and conceptual engagement with the residency site, a mixed-use industrial park in various states of activity and abandon. It adapts and re-orients a scaled-down version of something called a Standard Penetration Tests (SPT) used in geotechnical research to collect core and soil samples. T
This line of material inquiry took advantage of a large geotechnical study conducted by local geologists in 2015. The study focused on Barreiro and the nearby city of Setúbal. Its purpose was to determine how each city would withstand major and potentially destructive seismic activity should any occur.
In Barreiro, the study concentrated on the industrial land directly adjacent to the Rio Tejo. The area of specific concern was built by the Companhia União Fabril in order to expand their operations. Today, much of that site is reserved and unusable because it is too contaminated to reoccupy.
I collected discarded borehole cores found in ditches and other piles of waste material throughout the industrial park. I then turned the method of material analysis back onto itself and drilled boreholes into the cores, essentially sampling the samples.
In doing so, my aim was, first, to mimic a technical method of obtaining knowledge about the material properties of a specific site to better understand the limitations of those techniques: scientific analysis of space must necessarily represent its objects abstractly.
Second, I wanted to personally contend with the force of those methods and the effects they have on the environment.
Lastly, the conceptual aim was to consider how the fragmentary effects of those methods could be intensified to such an extent that a sedimentary formlessness could emerge in the material subsumed into a prevailing spatial practice. Such a formlessness, I think, exceeds the determining forces and abstract systemization of space that occur in the technical domination of the land. This is not to discount the importance of geotechnical engineering, only to find a material resistance to its abstractions on which to ground a granular practice of differential sociality.
2024