“The Deposition of Dust: interiority and presence in Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film: installation: 30.90852, Rotterdam (July 2021) is a critique of the assumptions of ecological neutrality at the base of interior spatial practices informed by Nam June Paik’s approach to emptiness and silence in film.”
The installation is a site-specific construction of an interior where dust is the vector of exchange between the body of the visitors and the space.
Angelo Ciccaglione (b. 1995) is a spatial designer and researcher based in Rotterdam. He obtained an MA (cum laude) at the Master Interior Architecture Design + Research in Piet Zwart Institute. His practice focuses on how the perception of air at different scales and in diverse sites may affect the ecological awareness of other design practitioners and the broader public. His projects have been exhibited at Dutch Design Week and in several other venues in Rotterdam. Website > https://ciccaglionestudio.com/
Writing about the site where Nam June Paik’s work was exhibited is the main structural element of the text work which has guided the spatial critique. I go into detail concerning how a particle of dust, travelling from the outer atmosphere ends up inside Paik’s work and this journey into the depths of the work, allowed me to deconstruct the site and to understand why there is no such thing as a completely empty space.
The installation, to which the writing relates, is, on the other hand, intended to demonstrate this argument and to thus offer a critique on design practices which approach sites in a standard, neutral way, disregarding the ecological and thus interconnected character of any site.
Nam June Paik’s Zen for Film (1961), a performative video work, is of central importance here.
John Cage’s composition 4’33” has been influential to my practice for thinking about silence and its impossibility.
Ellen Pearlman, ‘Nothing and Everything – The Influence of Buddhism on the American Avantgarde 1942 – 1962’ holds a pivotal role for opening up my views onto how Zen connects to Fluxus artists.
