The word “support” has many meanings. “To support” can be to hold up,
carry, brace, reinforce or underpin. It can also be to provide for
someone or something – to take care of and look after. Furthermore, it
can be to give moral support, to be a source of strength and comfort, to
encourage, buoy up, hearten and soothe. In speech and thought, it can
be to substantiate, to attest, verify and authenticate.
As a thing of physical limits, a
support can be a pillar or a beam, which through compression transmits
the weight of the above to other structural elements below; it can be
the place where the overlooking and the looking up meet. Whether small
and wooden like a beam, or glassy metal like a post, or duteous marble
like a caryatid, the purpose of a structural support is to be strong and
unwavering; except of course for when the underpinning’s hidden, then
beams and pillars can also be decorative – unconcerned with muscle but
robust-looking to the eyes.
As pillars compress to transmit
weight, or sit still to look as if they are, they are not unlike tissues
of plants that are joined together by aspiring horticulturalists to
bolster up shared growth. The scion (the upper part of the combined
plant) and the rootstock (the lower part) which keep the appearance of
separate parts, come together to merge into one another – to permanently
intertwine in this new life that is being grafted at the point where
the overlooking and the looking up meet, like carrying on the head –
human-powered transport – where burdens balance above sight but weigh
heavily on the nervous system.
Supports -the actions, the
objects, the metaphors- they move in circles, concentrically expanding
and coiling into and onto each other. One support supports another, one
grafts into another, one is grafted from another and into another yet,
inspiring ontologies of curves and arches – economies in which material
flows out and back. Biological nutrients circulate and re-enter the
biosphere. Technical nutrients circulate and re-enter the production
system. They regenerate and restore, again and again, forming circular
economies. And then, there’s that which unnamed, they generate silently
for future generations to anatomize and look at. Carved to Flow is one such circle
arching out and back from Athens to Kassel to somewhere else. In Athens
it is a laboratory where oils, butters and lye from all around the
Mediterranean, Middle East, North and West Africa meet to create a soap.
In Kassel it is storage and distribution, breathing stacked in towering
blocks of saponaceous lattice, danced around through carrier hands to
generate that which will circle back to somewhere else, to take new form
– a no-waste product carved to flow.
