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Ohad Meromi
Screen and Totem
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Screen and Totem speaks of the place it occupies. It reflects and screens it; it projects on it and is projected by it; it interferes with the space by dividing it; it creates a place, a new one. It is an architectonic creature which by nature is a provocation to space and place, and yet it is never really there, it never really finds its place.
Screen and Totem is a functional modular unit, devised to act upon a space; yet it is designed for a general place, not for a specific site. When one examines it at a second glance, its artificiality as a functional object is revealed - it’s a fraud. Its functionality is exaggerated up to the point of rendering it dysfunctional. Its modular design is a pastiche of styles. Modularity reveals itself as a metaphor for a modernistic world, a world that became a projection of the desire for reason.
As a pseudo-functional object, the work suggests the idea of breaking up the space in order to create a special zone- a semi-private retreat, a modernistic chillout. It offers the possibility of creating a differentiation between conditions and hierarchies in various spaces by erecting a wall element. However, it seems only to be speaking of such an act, rather than performing it. It does not really filter light or sound; it is a wall that is all window. And yet, it functions as a sign, performing the pure act of architecture; it structures a place by marking. And since the screen's two sides are principally identical, the little totem might come to serve as a sign of interiority.
Screen and Totem also converses with space by means of indexing, through its connotation to other materials and styles. It seems like a strange resurrection of modernist forms, and it is reminiscent of their reincarnation in fashionable retro display objects. It is a hybrid of both high and low emblems of modern style - merely preserving faint modernistic ideas, and remaking them till they become empty vessels, a near joke. One can find many examples of such cases in the periphery - distorted modernisms, bare, naked and misunderstood, made out of cheap materials and covered in heavy coats of paint, lacking the very idea of purity. Aluminum that is plastered in a horrible bronze coat and tinted Plexiglas mimic the modernistic idea of steel and glass used as an architectonic skin. However, as a "Mies Van Der Rohe made in Israel", the work's attitude towards high modernism is not really fixed. It seems to be oscillating between mocking the language of modernism and idealizing it.
Instead of Mies, other styles and visual dialects come into play in the work. The weird aesthetic of the Israeli environment is apparent here, with its strange and incomplete visual language, containing within it a cacophony of East and West, a collision of modernization and fundamentalism, the vulgarities of provinciality, and the scars of an impossible reality. It is the visual dialect of a young hybrid.
At the most basic level, the piece is a call for rearranging one's space, for rethinking it and restructuring it. Its unstable nature is brought into the space it inhabits, constantly suggesting change. While never really at peace at one place, it seems to establish the space of aspiration. If the utopia is the scar of placelessness, it offers in its place utopia's lawful son - the oxymoron of utopia-hybridia.
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