Cyprien Gaillard at Traf贸 Galeria, Budapest
The prospect of what we do not know, both individually and collectively, is terrifying. The final frontier. With the bottomless pit of the internet at our fingertips, it's easy to think we can know anything, should we choose to.
But this phenomenon keeps us coming back for more: we thrive off the mystique and the unknown. The Dunning-Kruger effect kicks in, and as one's confidence often decreases with the more knowledge one acquires, we also learn that exploring and mining new information and territories always comes with a firm power imbalance. Indigenous knowledge, peoples, and land swept away in favour of Imperialism and colonisation, the same stories over and over again, but in different time frames, and an inability to compartmentalise the fact that history does indeed repeat itself. This is barely any different to the billionaires exploring the depths of the oceans and the expanses of outer space. New information is never fully shared with the masses; it is gatekept for future investment to make the rich richer. For the mere mortals back on terra firma, sometimes the knowledge is so horrifying that we can't bear to know it, and when the knowledge is imposed upon us, we freeze, unable to know what to do with it.
At Traf贸 Galeria in Budapest, niche droplets of knowledge are presented wordlessly in video and sculptural forms. Traf贸 House of Contemporary Arts is a curious spot in the Hungarian capital, a cultural hub with offerings across theatre, performance and the visual arts. The gallery space itself is humble in size, but with a reputation for pushing forward experimental ideas in contemporary art, it is certainly worth a visit. It is in the fairly unassuming Corvin-Negyed neighbourhood, and there is a sense of art-fringe community within the space. At a time of accelerated displacement and gentrification in our cities, this feels important to capture.
Cyprien Gaillard's solo show, Ocean II Ocean, is a proud and dignified distributor of knowledge, steeped in the micro and the macro. There is also a sense of Gaillard doing the work of simply reminding his audience: we are so consumed and overwhelmed by information, we sometimes do not fathom the depths of our own knowledge. All that said, the exhibition's eponymous video, the sound of which reverberates around the whole space, flashes between stunningly slow shots of ammonite embedded into the walls at a Moscow train station. There is a message of state responsibility around destruction and failed aspirational models, which is passed sensitively between each piece.
After almost romantic shots of the Moscow underground network, and other Russian and former Soviet bloc transport hubs across Georgia, Germany, and the Ukraine, the viewer is brought to a sense of shock by documentation of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authorities (NYMTA) disposing of disused subway cars into the ocean. There is a sense of idealising the ocean for many, a playground, with a charming cast of characters from The Little Mermaid and Finding Nemo (neither of which shows the ocean as anything but a placid backdrop to an unrelated storyline. Fictionalised, the ocean is simply the Earth but under water). In reality, this is no place for humans, and certainly not for the debris and detritus that is supposedly unfit for purpose in human life. Witnessing the dumping of whole subway cars into the ocean feels arresting in its violence. This sinking, and proposed new life for the metal structures at the bed of the sea, feels unnerving on a second level when one thinks about the loss of life in the oceans not only throughout history including the Triangular Trade in the early nineteenth century, but also migrants travelling on boats towards England and France. Almost 100 people died crossing the Channel in 2024, which is a mere twenty-one miles long.
The exhibition is steeped in context that is whispered, not shouted. Gaillard's next video piece, The Lake Arches (Restored Version), is another example of this. Displayed on a lovingly nostalgic television set that is reminiscent of 1990s domesticity, the film shows two men playfully leaping off a concrete step into a seemingly adequate depth of water. Seconds later, both men emerge, with one bearing a bloodied nose, and the audience realises at the same time as the divers that they have in fact dived into a shallow, man-made body of water. The injuries to the man's face look dramatic and painful, suggesting a fight has just taken place. In keeping with the television set of a bygone era, the footage itself has a DIY quality, and once the shot pans out, the viewer is met with a better context of the body of water, which is in the vicinity of Les Arcades du Lac in outer Paris, realised in the early 1980s, and now a monument of the failed utopian modernist housing project. Beyond the gallery's description of Les Arcades acting here as a "reminder of utopian ideals collapsing under their own weight", we are also reminded of the ways in which the supposed progress of mankind has utterly destroyed out relationship with nature. While the wildness of the ocean is illustrated and made visible in Ocean II Ocean, The Lake Arches (Restored Version) shows that reshaping wildness and wildlife to be palatable to us is also an act of territorial and environmental violence.
As the soundtrack from Ocean II Ocean, a creeping, mournful steel pan symphony that is unique in its storytelling and engaging quality, is emitted throughout the space, it draws everything together so well that one forgets that the remaining two films are silent. Pruitt Igoe Falls is the final work and follows The Lake Arches exquisitely. In it, we watch the Sighthill Housing Estate in Glasgow, moments before its demolition, then moments later its crumbling descent not only into the ground but outwards into its surrounding environment. There is a cross-pollination of messaging in the works which needs corroborating, such as the difference between Sighthill and the work's eponymous estate, the Wendell O. Pruitt Homes and William Igoe Apartments, realised in 1954 and demolished less than two decades later. Based in St. Louis, Missouri, Pruitt Igoe was one of the largest social housing developments in the United States at the time. Blighted by both structural and social neglect, its demolition was eventually televised. Gaillard's work reproduces this fascination with destruction, with Sighthill not only crumbling, but generating such a vast amount of detritus in its wake that the impact to human and non-human life is palpable; a choking feeling emanates from the work, before its transformation. The second half of the film follows the drift of the thick smoke from the demolition and finds it lit in an almost neon palette of colours; incomprehensibly, we are witnessing Niagara Falls. Moving visually from life (through the model of social reproduction found within the housing estate), to death (the demolition), and back to life (the endless flow of water at Niagara) is both satisfying and unsettling. The built environment is constantly in this cycle, as are humanity and the natural environment.
Architectural theorist Charles Jencks said that the demolition of Pruitt Igoe was "the day modern architecture died" [1]. But this isn't only a snapshot of late-twentieth century architectural social history; this is a tale of wider injustice. The building and destruction of architecture always has human stories and impacts attached to it. Pruitt Igoe was home to mostly African American communities, and the social neglect they faced led to their displacement and the eventual demolition of their homes. Over in Glasgow, antisocial behaviour was becoming rife, and as history repeated itself and neglect ravaged another estate, Glaswegians left the development in droves. Sighthill was then used as temporary accommodation for refugees and asylum seekers, who were not appropriately informed when years later, the blocks were getting demolished. According to The Guardian's coverage, one of the blocks was "full to the point of bursting, even as it awaited its final death blow" [2]. The same article also speaks of how asylum seekers were placed there, in a highly deprived area with seriously entrenched issues including inadequate conditions for harsh winters, alongside increasing levels of crime and drug abuse.
The way that the demolition scene in Gaillard's work transitioned to a peaceful, although not picture perfect, view of Niagara Falls felt like falling through death into a calming afterlife. No more destruction, no more systemic neglect, no more felling that which we all need to live. It is hard not to find Ocean II Ocean, as a body of work, upsetting. It is, however, easier to activate a critical lens through which to view the links between environmental degradation and racism, xenophobia, and cleansing of the 'wrong' types of people or facades. We also see the ways that history is doomed to repeat itself, sometimes merely in the space of one generation. We realistically don't mourn architectural structures, but when the NYMTA discard large units made of metal and asbestos into the ocean, in the almost laughable guise of a reef restoration project, we really see that the birth and death of structures in the built and natural environments are bound to the life cycles of the people. Power and control are stripped from us through the things we do not and cannot know, and at times all we feel we can do is watch on in this new form of horror.
[1] Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture. New York: Academy Editions, 1977.
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/apr/22/disappearing-glasgow-documenting-demolition-city-troubled-past
