WA/VE: structural recycling of cultural artefacts

Robert McKaye + Stoyan Barakov

WA/VE was installed for Nuit Rose 2019, a queer art festival in Toronto. Conceived as a suspended, anticlastic mesh of recycled magazines, the piece draws parallels between print media and the state of queer culture. It began by the shuffling of print media together to take advantage of maximised friction between the bound pages. Like the threads of a weave, the pages exhibit high resistance to tension forces, making them hard to pull apart.

Leveraging this material property, WA/ VE becomes more than just a one-time installation – it reimagines a material that has outlived its original purpose but not its cultural and physical evocations. Print media, in the context of an architectural intervention, is given new significance through the agency of memory, nostalgia and consumerism. This demonstrates the duality of a single material acting as both artefact and artifice.

The project and its underlying assembly disrupts the traditional lifespan of an everyday object to achieve something new. In terms of our material future, WA/ VE touches on the persistence of form not purely through the longevity of particular materials, but through the perception of those materials and how we use them.

WA/VE, Nuit Rose 2019, Toronto

Mckaye and Barakov

On Site review: WA/VE is an art installation in a specific venue; the architectural discussion of its materiality and its potential to be an actual construction system appears to lie in the ability to simultaneously re-use a material without losing its cultural resonance. Is there a point where the evocations fall away (society moves on, the era in which the original material was created becomes archived, battles are won) and what is left is the curious property of thin bound sheets of paper to fuse through sheer surface tension?

McKaye + Barakov: WA/VE explored a particular material (magazines) and and how it could be manipulated to perform structurally. The compounded surface tension of interleaved pages is a principle which would hold true for novels, phonebooks, newspapers, each having its own unique character and aesthetic. The use of queer publications made it relevant for Nuit Rose; different genres of print material would have different tones. If the cells were sealed or dipped in resin and used as an envelope or rain screen building component, its longevity would allow it to outlive its cultural resonance. This was not the intention of the installation but certainly is the implication of print media as a building component.

On Site review: We have a generative project, WA/VE, and then we have the construction system it generates, the architectural discussion it generates and its role in generating another cultural, social and political conversation. At each point a different constituency enters the discussion.

McKaye + Barakov: We appreciate that you’ve picked up on this. It is for this reason that we reference wave in our title, as it seems to constantly be nodding backwards at something, while suggesting something else – a kind of periodic socio-culturalstructural cycle.

On Site review: I realise the importance of magazines to queer culture, they long served as a kind of samizdat communication stream: is this still the case in a world of Nuits Roses and a relative openness about LGBTQ2+ issues? Or do the magazines themselves have value as artefacts of a previous era?

McKaye + Barakov: Interesting question. In a Nuit Rose world the queer community no longer relies as heavily on print media for freedom of expression and identity – there are more visible platforms. Still, the magazines as symbols carry archival qualities and represent a time and place past. After being printed and put on magazine stands the magazine becomes an artefact which carries stories. The structure WA/VE could be seen as a sort of abstract time capsule. We often thought of the installation as a ‘cultural kaleidoscope’, as it was at the same time something specific, but also an abstraction – the artefact, the magazine, transformed into these reflective fractured images of LGBTQ2+ society. It was an act of separating the printed page into strictly parallel parts: the page and the imprint – both of which are artefacts. Their use as a new contemporary function is what we see as artifice.

On Site review: Is the form found in the installation the one that shuffled magazines have to make? Does the form come from the process of meshing, or is it something you chose?

McKaye + Barakov: After weaving a row of magazines together we stood them up. There were a few configurations we imagined, all of which were very different in the simulated digital space from the actual fabricated space – obviously because it was an elastic structure. We tried three-sided, five- and six-sided cells. We also imagined weaving the rows together like a basket rather than creating cells. By observing their behaviour when aggregated, the overall geometry took a shape on its own. The material had its own limitations that could be quite easily observed – à la Louis Kahn, it knew what it wanted to be! Our goal was to create something aesthetically pleasing and easily digestible for mainstream audiences. The hexagons attached to each other resembled this loose image of beehive, or honeycomb, something associated with ideas of shelter and nurture.

On Site review: Is WA/VE a case study whose lessons might be applied to other materials?

McKaye + Barakov: WA/VE is part of a potentially huge field of research into the recycling of materials. Is it better/more efficient to just outright recycle things? or can up-cycling add additional value through the preservation of existing intent and cultural resonance for as long as possible? For us, this was a re-imagining of an existing energy/effort; it tried to leverage a previously machined product’s intrinsic qualities for a new function. When you break open this idea, what other options are there? We wish to go beyond this scale and using just queer culture publications — we could create some sort of a house/shelter using the magazine weaving approach. Living the hexagonal life!

On Site review: I’d quite like to see two magazines being shuffled together and how they then magically attach to another set.

McKaye + Barakov: Imagine if you shuffled half of one book halfway into another – like a deck of cards – ideally alternating every single page for maximum tension. The un-shuffled half of each could then accept additional books, forming a chain of friction-fit connections. As each half-magazine connects as it shuffles into the next, their staggered spines allow for controlled deformation when the shape is bent or twisted. As a sort of flexible beam, it demonstrates rigidity, but also provides inflection points to give the component an elastic quality.

Mckaye and Barakov

On Site review: When you say that a single material can act as both artefact and artifice, does WA/VE become an artefact in itself — a pinpointing of a particular time in the trajectory of queer culture that could not have come earlier, or later, to have the same charge?

McKaye + Barakov: We believe this project to be extremely topical, not necessarily because of queer culture but because of its provocations in recycling and waste. That said, as queer artists ourselves we feel strongly about the state of our community. In many ways today’s queer culture is more complex and varied than ever, but this diversity is often overshadowed by representation in the media and has lost much of its activisim. We may dare to say that in some subsets of queer culture the history of how and why we are where we are today has been lost. It is for that reason we chose create this reflection.

Stoyan Barakov is a Bulgarian-Canadian artist whose sculpture and installation work addresses themes nostalgia, memory and loss. Robert McKaye is a Canadian architect and interaction designer with a penchant for prototyping and computation. Their art group, Collective Memory, explores these themes in the realm of public art.