Brownfields

Brownfields extends Cesare Botti’s ongoing investigation into the hidden infrastructures that shape the built environment.  During his explorations in abandoned and demolished industrial buildings,  construction sites, and infrastructural spaces, the artist collects discarded technical drawings, bureaucratic spreadsheets and construction plans. These papers, normally invisible to the public, precisely describe every aspect of the built environment, even before it comes to existence. Engaging with these fragments of reality allows the artist to access subjects like railway networks, production plants or electrical systems, structures of a scale otherwise inaccessible to individual experience.

Through oil treatment and perforation with office tools, these papers are rendered transparent and porous, and layered in order to make their marks blend and resonate. Disconnected from the original destination, their information overlaps and erodes, turning executive plans into drifting terrains. Detached from their original function, they are reclaimed as cultural objects, markers of a broader logic of planning, accumulation and obsolescence.

Installed in a shopfront vitrine and displayed using the visual grammar of real estate windows, the work stages a reversal: documents from behind the scenes are placed at the front, infrastructure becomes façade. By dissolving function into ornament, the work questions what’s the relation between the language used for planning and the material world that it produces, and what remains of those signs once the described systems have disappeared, highlighting the tension between construction and erosion, progress and ruin.