If buildings carry memories, does it mean we should erase them? An exhibition by artist Jesse Jones asks these and other questions about structures' past and future
DO BUILDINGS HAVE souls? If you listen carefully, can you hear them speak? We've probably all had the experience of feeling the hushed calm of an empty church, and some have felt the tension remaining in the charged space of a vacant courtroom.
Would you feel such things, however, if you didn't know the histories of these places? How much of the emotional life of a building comes from our own expectations and how much from some residual sense of its history that has seeped, over the years and centuries, into its walls? And what happens with those buildings that have difficult histories? Should they be demolished, or allowed to remain, memorialising or leaving open doors to understanding about past actions, past mistakes?
Architecture creates these spaces, but it often takes an artist to explore the effects of time and history on them. This is one of the themes that Dublin-based artist Jesse Jones takes up in her exhibition, The Spectre and the Sphere, currently at Project Arts Centre. In a 12-minute film, Jones explores the Vooruit, a space in Ghent in Belgium that is, as she puts it, "an allegory of the entirety of what I felt about architecture . . ."
By this, she is describing her growing sense of the ways in which architecture shapes the social spaces we inhabit, and at the same time makes physical our desires, ideologies and politics. Once built, architecture also becomes the setting for the experiences we have within it, and a symbol of those experiences. From Georgian Dublin, to Liberty Hall, to Tallaght, to Ballymun, we can see the city's history written in our buildings, but sometimes we are too close to it to see exactly what that history may be.
"The first time I was consciously thinking about the problem of architecture," Jones says, "was when I was doing my Masters. I was living out in Tallaght with my mum, and I was coming in on the bus every day. It was such drudgery, looking around each morning at 25 cranes on the horizon, producing nothing. And I was thinking about the futility of the sort of production that happened during the Celtic Tiger. It had this huge mechanics of potential behind it, but no one was thinking about what the production of social space was actually meant to achieve."
As a response to this, Jones tried to organise an opera performance on a building site, fascinated by the way these sites seem like such stage sets, with their choreographed work going on. But after calling every major construction site in the country, to no avail, she realised that there was no space for ideas to take root and flower within the industry.
"Art," she says, "should work as an intervention, a critique, to remind people that there is another prism to look at a situation through, to remind them that they are producing space where things will happen. And that they may be producing space where problems are replicated."
Jones traces her fascination with the way architecture creates social (and anti-social) space to her own background, although she says it's only now that she can consciously identify with it. She grew up in a tower block on St Michael's Estate in Inchicore, and was moved with her family to Tallaght in a housing initiative that was meant to get people out of the inner city and into suburbia. She describes Tallaght as "like being in LA, or something - there's not really any intimate spaces, it's miles to the shops, you have to have a car . . . My school walk was half an hour through a field of muck, and yet the place was built to be inhabited by a huge amount of teenagers that were being moved out from the social housing blocks. So they built suburbia, but they didn't build a path for the kids to walk to school."
With the Vooruit, Jones found a building that was full of space for ideas, and one in which she could examine the emotional life of architecture in all its facets. Built initially as a socialist castle by a worker's collective between 1910 and 1918, the Vooruit had a theatre, halls and many rooms. The Fascists took it over in the second World War, ripped out the theatre seats and stabled horses there.
After the war, the Ghent orphans were brought in to try to find their parents, and later still, the building fell into disrepair, until the 1980s, when a group of artists and activists broke in and began to re-energise the space.
NOW IT IS a flourishing centre for art, and one of Ghent's most treasured buildings.
"I'd done my research on the history of it," says Jones, "but when I walked in and walked around it, I could feel the vibration, I could feel it vibrating with its complex history. It's not a vacuum like a white cube gallery, it embodies ideas, it performs . . . And that's when I started to imagine the 'whisper choir'."
In her film, the camera roams the corridors of the Vooruit and pans across the ornate theatre, where notation of the Communist people's anthem, The Internationale, is inscribed in stained glass, and the message "Kunst Veredelt" ("Art Ennobles") is emblazoned above the stage. As the camera moves, exploring the building, the voices of Jones's "whisper choir" murmur and mutter lines from The Communist Manifesto, by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The effect is both haunting and stunning, the indistinct voices creating the feeling that the building is trying to speak, that you are eavesdropping on the layered time of its past.
"A building has the potential," says Jones, "to behave like a book, and a book has the potential to behave like a piece of architecture." Here, the Vooruit spreads its story out, like a book, while The Communist Manifesto can feel, as Jones describes it "like a huge, concrete sort of a thing, with the potential to shape society". But thinking about Marx sitting in the British Museum writing the Manifesto, you can also, Jones imagines, "bring it back to a whisper".
Another project saw Jones making a work sited and exhibited in the old swimming pool in Ballymun. She describes the building as "absolutely stunning", but it's a space that people now "just want to throw away". They want to throw it away, to demolish it, "because they want to apologise for mistakes, and they want to apologise through architecture".
But "it's not enough to apologise through architecture", she adds. "You need to apologise through the whole social economy and the social contract with people. And that's also what you need to apologise for, not for having an ambitious architectural idea which did work in other places."
The demolition of Ballymun's towers is an interesting issue. In most of the literature produced by Breaking Ground, the massive Per Cent for Art scheme that has accompanied the redevelopment of Ballymun, the main image used is of the iconic towers, which are to be completely demolished by the time the project is complete.
"Eradication can be a dangerous process," says Jones. "Because if you eradicate something, like a building, potentially it can happen again because there is no living memory to show the problematics of space."
The problems arise, however, when you end up making a monument to failure. "Artists can be quite romantic in how they view failure," Jones says. "So maybe the failure of the architecture in Ballymun is why it's become such a cultural muse, and that's a dangerous thing, because if you're wrapped up in that you don't see the continuation of the economic process of social exclusion, which is still synonymous with Celtic Tiger Ireland."
SHE DESCRIBES THIS as being "an artist's way of thinking about things", although architecture firm O'Donnell and Tuomey also worked with an existing failed structure, rather than demolishing it, in a project to convert the former industrial school at Letterfrack into a furniture college. The resulting exhibition exposed and explored the troubled history of the place, and was one of the highlights of the Venice Biennale four years ago.
The practice of building and design may seem inimical to abstraction, but as Jones, and O'Donnell and Tuomey, have shown, a little abstraction can hear the voices and reveal the secret soul of buildings - and that has the potential to make the world a richer place.
The Spectre and the Sphere, Project Arts Centre, Dublin, until June 14; www.project.ie