Jorge Otero-Pailos: "Experimental Preservation" (May 28)

The Ethics of Dust: Trajan's Column (2015) at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (photo courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum / Peter Kelleher)

 JORGE OTERO-PAILOS
Jorge Otero-Pailos  (b. 1971) works at the intersection of art, architecture and preservation. He has been exhibited at major museums, festivals, galleries and foundations. Notably, Manifesta7 and the 53rd Venice Art Biennial. In 2009 he was listed as one of ten young Spanish artists to watch in Architectural Digest and featured that same year in the BBC TV’s documentary Ugly Beauty alongside Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor, Carl Andre, and Yoko Ono. He has received awards from major art, architecture and preservation organizations including the Kress Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Fitch Foundation, and the Canadian Center for Architecture, and in 2012 the UNESCO Eminent Professional Award. He is a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences of Puerto Rico.

Otero-Pailos studied architecture at Cornell University and holds a PhD from MIT. He is Associate Professor of Historic Preservation at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture in New York. He is the founder and editor of the journal Future Anterior .

His work "The Ethics of Dust: Trajan's Column" (2015, pictured above) is currently exhibited at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. Otero-Pailos has used conservation latex to ‘clean’ the hollow brick inside surface of column, removing dust and dirt accumulated over decades. The resulting material is exhibited adjacent to its source, turning the plaster column inside-out, displaying the passage of time, and revealing this otherwise invisible object.

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