Experimental preservation: art, air-pollution, preservation and Jorge Otero-Pailos

Experimental preservation questions the conventional approaches to heritage by working with objects and through disciplines that are usually reputed to be extrinsic to the field. It opts for cultural objects that are canonically reckoned as ugly or aesthetically undistinguished, but that in a way incarnate material, social, and environmental costs of our time. Choosing as cultural objects what philosopher Michel Serres calls the quasi-objects, these works interpret heritage as an ongoing process of human interactions, highlighting the social implications those objects determine. Thus, they work on a sort of “surface” between people and objects, a “surface methodology” that “documents, understands, and intervenes upon objects, […] expanding across a spectrum of the tangible and intangible”. Jorge Otero-Pailos (1971-) plays a key role in this scenario. His work and his ongoing art-series The Ethics of Dust (2008-) is here delved into the light of his research and contemporary aesthetics, also thanks to a short interview that he recently gave me for this purpose. Resulting from cleaning selected heritage buildings by a latex pastry where dust and deposits get trapped in, The Ethics of Dust forms an intentional monument to the atmosphere and the interactions with buildings that it generated over time. Working at the intersection of art, architecture, and preservation, on objects that are beyond the official nature of heritage, Otero-Pailos tests and pushes forward the boundaries between the disciplines.