The Embassy for Dirty Things, Messy Ideas & Unfinished Endeavours
The Bartlett, UCL
2021
Dirt is about difference—that which is foreign or ‘out of place’. It is used to describe the left-over and in-between. Seeking to rewild cultural attitudes towards the threatening and ambiguous ‘other’, the Embassy for Dirty Things, Messy Ideas & Unfinished Endeavours finds potential in the murky margins of social, cultural, and political operations. Using dirt’s power to disrupt current systems of classification, the project smudges the logic of bureaucratic order, rules and regulations, supposed truths, and objective values, through a tactile and conceptual investigation into our relationship with dirt.
The project sets out to explore the transgressive potential between the binaries we have come to find comfort in through formal paradoxes, material contradictions, programmatic hybrids, and the blurry division of space. Sited in London’s bureaucratic distric, Westminster, the Embassy evolves as a shared artefact while mediating between powers of protest, authority, property, ownership, representation, and authorship.
The Bartlett, UCL
2021
Dirt is about difference—that which is foreign or ‘out of place’. It is used to describe the left-over and in-between. Seeking to rewild cultural attitudes towards the threatening and ambiguous ‘other’, the Embassy for Dirty Things, Messy Ideas & Unfinished Endeavours finds potential in the murky margins of social, cultural, and political operations. Using dirt’s power to disrupt current systems of classification, the project smudges the logic of bureaucratic order, rules and regulations, supposed truths, and objective values, through a tactile and conceptual investigation into our relationship with dirt.
The project sets out to explore the transgressive potential between the binaries we have come to find comfort in through formal paradoxes, material contradictions, programmatic hybrids, and the blurry division of space. Sited in London’s bureaucratic distric, Westminster, the Embassy evolves as a shared artefact while mediating between powers of protest, authority, property, ownership, representation, and authorship.
