Benji Boyadgian
THE DISCORD
The idea of ‘discord’ stems from its geological definition. It is an attempt to look at what lies beneath the surface of ‘tiles’ as the subject and core of the artistic research. Therefore, the tiles can be considered as a literal analogy of ‘surface’, as well as the source inspiration for this project that lasted six years.
The notion of surface contains information in the standpoint of the long temporality, whilst in a certain way, it tends to create entropy by the machines of the industrial era.
The tiles are evidently a trace of an accumulative history. The Discord dismantles the entangled layers and temporalities encompassing the story of those tiles. The numerous fictions hovering around these histories, which the project researched and reflected on are the suggestions of layered, eroded, discordant surfaces and sediments.
The project itself addresses a discordant act of digging through layers by inverting temporalities of multiple histories and the present.
The Discord. Watercolour series.
Simultaneously a trace and an accumulation, “hydraulic tiles” are the result of a series of appropriations and mutations of patterns in the historical temporality, culminating into the potentiality to reproduce its image infinitely. But where did this image originate? What happened when it started to derivate across borders? Those cement tiles are objects that go beyond their functionality and materiality, but exists in the time and space of phantasmagoria. They contain desires, stir imaginaries, and are subject to projections. Scratching the surface of those tiles, underlying layers appear, the sediments of history forming discordant dialectics. Discordance in geology is ‘an unconformity characterized by an absence of parallelism between adjacent series’. The project connects the idea of discordance to the story of those tiles. A process based painting experiment on the interpretation, repetition and mutation of patterns extracted from the tiles. Suggesting an alternative fiction for those patterns. Attempting to unsettle the imaginaries associated with those tiles. A metaphor of repeating patterns.
