Metropotamia (2011) Julia Tcharfas and Tim Ivison, Hilary Crisp Gallery, London, UK
Consisting of a sculptural installation of objects and fragmented architectural proposals, the work makes reference to a legacy of unrealised utopias and cast-off concepts. Ivison and Tcharfas configure the gallery as both building site and post-studio burial ground, traversed by alley cats.
‘Metropotamia’ was one of many rejected titles proposed by Thomas Jefferson for the Ohio Country in the American Midwest, later made lower Michigan in the Land Ordinance Survey of 1784. This mark of frontier optimism, conflated with the fact that lower Michigan is now the regional home of Detroit – the archetypal city of post-industrial decay – creates an ambivalent and uneasy folding of the ideology of progress into the wreckage of the present reality.
The partial follies, damaged models, ephemeral proposals, and temporary treatment of the materials and their juxtaposition on the forensic framework of a grid suggest the tacit configuration of a city of monuments. Constructivist scaffolding and cardboard geodesics are made from material trawled from the remains of local vacated office blocks and demolished council housing, ubiquitous home improvement off-cuts made to stand for ancient totemic structures. The presence of the cats, who both live in and manipulate the space of the installation, warp any steady sense of use value, and emphasize the sense that modernism has been domesticated to the scale of the interior. Utopia is, in the final analysis, a civilizing force, bringing into being new forms of subjectivity.