Dining with the Wolf Space p11
We all know the story of The Three Little Pigs. Neither straw nor wood will keep out the wolf, only the house of bricks. What does the frustrated wolf do? In the popular 1922 retelling by Flora Annie Steel, he climbs down the chimney and into a pot where he’s boiled for the pigs’ supper. Left, a scene from the project documentation film, “How to Bake 30 Bricks,” depicts the demolding process for a batch of bricks.
When Western thought turns to nature, it tends to do so from the standpoint of Enlightenment ideas about human subjectification of nature through industrious labor so neatly captured in this tale. As humans increasingly find ourselves subject to nature despite or even because of our grandest interventions, the story becomes less convincing. Could it be we never really boiled the wolf, its breath just got hotter? As the house of bricks melts, our world begins to collapse. Part slow-burn durational performance, part landscape diorama, Liz Galvez’s Im(Material) Space, Designing with Air, at Space p11 in the Chicago Pedway, updates the tale of the Three Little Pigs for a new era of mutual subjectivity. True to the industrious spirit of the Three Little Pigs, Galvez first toils at brick-making, Dining with the Wolf
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