Jorge Otero-Pailos

Distributed Monuments is a body of work made of dust transferred onto latex casts and enclosed in light boxes. Each cast is extracted from distinct site-specific interventions performed by Otero-Pailos as part of his ongoing, decade-long investigative series of works called The Ethics of Dust. 

The artworks’ materials come from historically charged monuments such as Westminster Hall in London, the Doge’s Palace in Venice, or the U.S. Old Mint in San Francisco.

Designed to be easily transported, Distributed Monuments question our relationship with buildings as cultural objects and inspire us to care for the objects as such, to become cultural stewards. 

An Olfactory Reconstruction of the Philip Johnson Glass House

2008

Exhibited in  New Canaan, Connecticut. 

An Olfactory Reconstruction of the Philip Johnson Glass House is a project of a series of three smells based on archival research that reconstruct the 1949, 1959 and 1969 smells of this iconic American house, now belonging to the National Trust for Historic Preservation. 

Continuous Cities is a series of work consisting of city maps that Jorge Otero-Pailos has collected since the '90s and on which he has painted patterns.

“These are pieces that are a reflection on what cities have become today. Cities are the major long-lasting monuments that we are collectively constructing together as a civilization. These pieces are drawn on historic maps, which I've been collecting over many years since the '90s. When I started collecting them, I didn't really know that they were going to disappear. It used to be that we all had one of these in our pockets but now we have it all in our phones. So these are historic documents in and of themselves. On one level I'm trying to show that the relationship to the world has changed, our relationship to the environment has changed. We no longer use these maps to move around. But secondly, I'm showing that the way we move around is as if we move in a continuous city. Most of us never get far beyond the city. We travel great distances on a plane from city to city but we are rarely ever not in a city. There's a narrowness of focus in our life, in our world experience, that on the one hand feels incredibly expansive (we are able to go everywhere relatively cheaply) and on the other hand we don't really get past the urban experience. With Continuous City, I treat all of these cities as one big city. It's related to the notion of Distributed Monuments in the way that it thinks about each of these cities as part of a global city, a massive urbanization of the planet. If you look around, most of what you will see is less than 50 years old. In the last 50 years we have exploded in terms of urban construction. The energy that we use and the pollution that we make to do that is the problem. As a preservationist, I know that our buildings are going to have to be rebuilt in the next 50 years because they're not built well and they're not going to last. And we don't have the energy to do that. We don't have the energy to rebuild our planet another time at the scale that we just did.

So it's as if these cities are connected and part of the same network and there's no outside to them. I'm very interested in how we get outside of them. How do we go from this city to that city? And then I start to transpose pieces of cities on top of other cities. So for example, I take the name of a neighborhood in New York and I name a neighborhood in Montreal the same way. Or I identify patterns. There's always a golden ghetto in a city, a place where all the rich are living. And it's very much a ghetto. So I try to call out places like this. I replan the city a bit and I'm trying to add a continuous aesthetic across all of these maps to link all of them together so that they read as one big city. There all in the same aesthetic whereas the original historic maps all look different.

Now, when you go look at a city, they all look the same because we all look at them through Google Maps. So in way these works already saw it coming. It's funny because these works are in between the moment in which every map from every city looked different and then the transformative moment of when they became the same. They're telling the story of when this transition happened. That's very much our moment, our lived experience. It's within your lifetime and my lifetime that that's happened.”