DAGMARA GENDA

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mail@dagmaragenda.com
+49 (0)1573 1834 625

Public Art Competition, Winnipeg 2017, Shortlist

Description: A design for public art was to be developed for a bridge and bustop for the extension of the transit system in Winnipeg, Canada. The theme was "trails," and I proposed an architectural "line drawing" made with reflective street marking and concrete forms that would extend over a bridge and mark the bus stop.

Concept: Trails most clearly resemble drawings when we trace their meandering routes on a map, but they are also live drawings that are enacted across time. They are traces of movement (as in footpaths), connecting lines (highways), as well as markers of territory. It's easy to draw onto a map to plot out a new direction, but doing so in the real world is an entirely different process, and the act of translation doesn't always go according to plan, or put another way, can yield unexpected results. My proposal for the Chancellor site is to make use of this disjunct between the plan and the world, between the drawing and reality, by drawing directly onto the two sites, in order to connect them to one another, and also, to create new pathways.

The system of North-South Trails that connected Winnipeg to larger trading networks has changed and expanded over the course of the years. They have been used by many different peoples and have served a variety of different, and oftentimes competing, interests. Rather than privileging one history over another, or creating a medley of stories, I propose to use the vocabulary common to our contemporary pathways i.e. highways, to build new trails that allow for different types of movement or perceptions of the Chancellor site. The materials will be concrete and/or asphalt and retroreflective marking paint—exactly what we use to build roads today. In this way, I'd like to propose a potential for alternative meanings through playful, aesthetic intervention that is deeply integrated with the proposed sites. Instead of a work placed in the site, I'd like to imagine the site itself distorting itself, or rupturing beyond its boundaries, creating new propositions for public space.