Colosse Aux Pieds D'Argile Colosse Aux Pieds D'Argile

Does human progress necessitate destruction? The works of Rayyane Tabet point out unlikely affinities between the ancient and the contemporary, and the economic and symbolic exchanges that comprise ‘culture’, as well as confluences between disparate geographical regions. In one work, Tabet showed how the expensive architectural elements from the East that found their way to wealthy Italian estates in the nineteenth century were there for a simple economic reason: heavy boats move more swiftly than light ones, and so boats were loaded with stone and marble architectural details from buildings, which were then sold off as exotic treasure.

Tabet’s Colosse aux pieds d’argile is a sculptural installation comprising numerous marble columns and concrete cylinders. The columns were found by the artist in a junkyard in his native Beirut. He learnt that they had come from a family home in the middle of the city. A real-estate speculator wanted to purchase the house for the prime site on which it stood, but the many family members who had inherited it were engaged in a legal dispute that made it impossible to sell it. According to property laws in Beirut, a home with no roof must either be fully renovated or sold, and so the developer hired a group of workers to covertly collapse the roof.

Tabet’s work employs physical elements from the past and present of this location. Placed alongside the architectural columns of the broken building are concrete cylinders – stress samples from the skyscraper that was built to replace the house, used as part of a structural analysis of the building’s foundation, which were ultimately given to the artist. The work examines the unexpected alliance between the column and the cylinder. Although they appear similar, they actually come from vastly different sources. The marble and sandstone objects in the installation give the appearance of an ancient ruin, aligning the old family home with the more recent condominium on the same site. Tabet’s work looks at the commonalities between homesteads past and present, the destruction and natural entropy of buildings and architectures, as well as capitalist profit-making and its processes of ruin.