Irene Kopelman

– Casa Wabi 2015

Community Project
Log-Piece
Biography
Images

Community Project

Jardín Manialtepec – Comunidad San José Manialtepec
“My interest from the beginning was to make a garden. The idea, on the one hand, was to make a piece that could stay in the community, and on the other to generate a community activity around the garden’s assembly with the school’s children to develop a different appreciation of the plants.
Overall, it was decided that the garden would be formed only by plants in the region since we were interested in revalidating these species and that they would be the ones that would best adapt to the conditions of the area. This process involved visiting the botanical garden of Puerto Escondido and several visits to plant nurseries where we could talk with specialists and record the plants with which it would be possible to work. Then followed a part of a more personal process that was to design the garden. For this, I thought of plants as if they were materials for pictorial composition. Color, texture, and volume were the variables to be taken into account – in addition to the clear pattern of plant growth since the garden would continue to grow after the installation and my departure from Wabi.” Irene Kopelman.

Log-Piece

Sin Título (2015) Dibujo a color sobre papel

Sin Título (2015)
Dibujo a color sobre papel

Argentina

Lives and work in Amsterdam, Netherlands

Cordoba, Argentina, 1974. Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands. “I read my practice within the notion of models. I use the term models as the instance of materialization between the thinking process and the word. I am inspired by this concept, which is used by most of the disciplines of knowledge. Many areas of studies generate models with the aim of granting access to and subsequently organizing the world (for instance models of the planets in astronomy, chemical models in order to represent the atoms, archeological models to represent lost civilizations and even abstract, but not formal, models as it would be in the case of mathematical or economical models). I hope to make evident that it is impossible to enclose the complexity of things in departmentally tight categories: During the 19th century, a scientific project needed to force things into categories in order to visualize the rules to which they respond and organize the world in a logical system. This was a fundamental process to schematize how we look at things and simplify it to the extreme, thus overlooking any singularities. I aim to reopen the category of sameness and, by means of representation, I hope to make evident that it is impossible to enclose the complexity of things in departmentally tight categories. I wish to explore the link in between two sources, the direct contact with the landscape and the mediated contact with it via the museum collections. I am keen to search for a way to put together these elements, working towards a generation of a narrative, which will emerge when all these components coexist. This dynamic of difference and repetition is the central axis of my work.”
Irene Kopelman´s residency in Fundación Casa Wabi was supported by The Mondriaan Fund.