ENG |
The Ice Box was created for the Casablanca Biennale of 2009, an event inaugurating the reopening of the city’s abandoned slaughterhouse as a contemporary art space. Composed of 150 blocks of industrial ice, the Ice Box, like the abattoir itself, is a space apart: a quiet space in a public building, a cold space in a hot climate, a wet space in a dry landscape. Like the abattoir, it is a place ever-conscious of its own disappearance. More than a commentary on disappearance, however, the Ice Box is a metamorphosis: from an enclosed space it acquires windows, becomes a screen, a ruin, and then finally a memory. The Ice Box represents the purest form of public space: a space of interaction and encounter between individuals and their environment. Program, use, and type are neither predefined nor fixed, but merely a temporary state between the disappearance of the last state and the creation of the next.
