From the scale of whole buildings to the nooks within pieces of furniture, the sculptural work of British artist Rachel Whiteread materialises particular voids — confronting the viewer with a tangible object, the corresponding ‘positive’ to a negative space that both offers and witnesses the possibility of inhabitation.

On the occasion of her latest installation …And the Animals Were Sold, curated by GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo and on view at the Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo, KoozArch had the opportunity to sit down with Whiteread and talk about her approach, the interaction of her sculptures with the urban environment, and the artist’s response to the isolation and alienation of COVID-19, by which the region of Bergamo was gravely affected. Whiteread reflects on the influence of her family, the ‘eureka’ moment which led her to crystallise her practice, and the possibility of memorialisation. The installation at the Palazzo della Ragione in Bergamo will continue until October 29 2023, after which parts of the work will be donated to the city as permanent installations.

KOOZ Since your very first cast of a single wardrobe, Closet (1988), your lifelong project has fused everyday vernacular forms with personal yet universal human experiences and memories, creating works which lie at the intersection of the domestic, the intimate and the monumental. How do your works unveil the emotional power of the built environment that surrounds us?

RACHEL WHITEREAD As my work is very personal, I try to express my own feelings and interpretations of the world and I consider every piece as having a sort of soul. I am obviously very familiar with architecture, with the history of architecture, the history of sculpture, the history of painting, the history of literature, and my work is the sum of all of this knowledge. Contemporarily, I am always looking and taking photographs; it then all comes together in the studio, where it becomes about one piece informing the next. You can't just, you know, go out in the world and think — it's so much more complex than that. It's a culmination of many thoughts, many years of experience, a lot of mistakes and also a lot of things going well.

KOOZ You dedicated your first public commission, Water Tower (1988), to your father, stating that his interest in industrial archaeology enabled you to look up. Later on, when undertaking a series of castings of your Bethnal Green studio in London, you expressed a desire for mapping the building. To what extent do your works exist as both archaeologies and personal biographies?

RW I work with personal biographies. My mother was an artist, whilst my father was a geographer and historian who eventually became head of an art school because he was also a very good administrator. As a child, he would take me for walks; there'd be a Roman Road and so I would be looking for this and for that…

At the same time, I have always been interested in urban regeneration and renewal, the way in which metropolises develop. Beyond London, where I lived for most of my life, I've also lived in a number of other cities and have always been fascinated by how and why cities have been planned in certain ways, the way they dictate where and how the poorer or wealthier citizens get to live. From the urban to the rural, I am fundamentally interested in how people live, how they travel and locate themselves on the crust of this planet. I believe there are similarities which can be drawn between how people travel to work — the paths that they choose to take and carve for themselves through beautifully designed architectural artefacts, which might not be the prescribed route defined by the planner — and animal pathways. For me, it boils down to free will and how people manage their place in the world. It's all very political, and all these elements come into the work at some point or other.

KOOZ Through the casting of domestic spaces—I am thinking about Ghost (1990) and House (1993), as well as the BBC Broadcasting House with Untitled 101 (2003)—you have said that you “mummify the air in the room”, turning habitable space into an impenetrable mass. By doing so, your work essentially builds the unbuilt, pushing the viewer to “become the wall”. How do these works question the spatial quality of the room? What traces do they unveil or allude to?

RW If we go back to the original, Ghost, which was the first room piece that I made after Closet, my first sculpture, both works were done in a very similar way. In both cases it involved thinking about a box, whether the box was at the scale of the room or of a wardrobe. It ultimately comes down to four walls, a ceiling and a floor. At that time, I was also thinking a lot about perspective and someone like Piero Della Francesca and what surprised me was that, at the time of casting Ghost, I hadn't fully realised what I was doing until I put it back together in the studio. I was casting the space one piece at a time and putting it up against the wall, and it wasn't until I took all these pieces back to the studio and started to put them back together that I realised that I had done something rather extraordinary. Although the space itself existed, it didn't exist in that form. I had made the view of the wall, and for me, that was a really profound moment in the making of my work which sparked the rest of my career. I suppose that was my ‘Eureka’ moment.

KOOZ This idea of “mummifying the air in the room” becomes extremely interesting when analysing your latest project And the Animals Were Sold, currently on show at GAMeC in Bergamo. You present casts of sixty chairs, each placed exactlytwo metres apart, as per the requirements for social distancing imposed during theCOVID-19 outbreak. Could you expand upon what prompted the project — especially in Bergamo, one of the first and worst sites to be hit by the pandemic back in 2020?

RW When I was asked to go to Bergamo to do a piece — the first place to which I travelled to ‘after’ Covid-19 — I knew what had happened in the region which, outside of China, was one of the first and worst to be hit by the pandemic: every family lost someone. I mean, you remember the pictures on the news of what happened. So I wanted to try and make a work which would not illustrate Covid-19 but which could rather help heal the place and help people deal with the enormity of the loss.

I travel to Italy a lot, am very fond of the country and believe that I have established a connection with the place. Yet when we travelled there for the first time post-pandemic, we were very surprised at how complex people's feelings were towards myself and my colleague. We were viewed as aliens and treated in a very peculiar way. I'm not saying this unkindly, rather to illustrate that this clearly revealed the enormity of the trauma that these people and the town had been through. This experience really made me think and when I saw the site, the work came to me in an instant.

Following the visit, it was up to the city to find the funding to be able to make the work happen. I am very grateful to the curator for helping me put this together and in conversation with the local community. From the offset, the ambition was to create a number of marble pieces that would be based on the colours of the surrounding square and the cathedral. So we started visiting nearby quarries where this stone could be sourced. Originally the number of pieces which could be achieved within the budget amounted to thirty but gradually, as the people understood what we were trying to achieve, the entire city got behind the project and we were able to make sixty pieces, a much better number for that space.

The first time I saw the work was when I finished installing it. It was all done extremely quickly and with a lot of emotion, I suppose. I was absolutely blown away with how it felt; I'm very proud of it, actually. I think the people really understood it and shared this process of healing. The work will be up until October; after that, a number of the pieces have been donated to the city and will be installed as a sort of permanent memorial.

KOOZ Titled One Hundred Spaces, your first casting of chairs — in coloured resin — was undertaken in 1995. The works presented at GAMeC have, as you mentioned, been produced using various types of stone, related to the exhibition venue: Sarnico stone and Zandobbio marble help the piece to establish a close relationship with the territory and its history, as well as with the architecture of the host venue. How do you approach the notion of context and to what extent are your works also a reflection on the material culture that surrounds us? Are you interested in moving away from cement towards more sustainable materials?

RW The chair is a motif that I've used for quite a long time now. By casting these spaces, I realised that they were like buildings. So then I made a hundred spaces and various other pieces, using resin and clear materials. For this specific project, I was drawn back to the chair because of its nature as an everyday personal object and because I also knew that they would act almost like gravestones or markers. Moreover, most chairs can host one person at a time, and the pieces thus also exist as people who can arrange themselves in the space according to many different configurations.

The material chosen for each work depends on the very nature of the work and where it will be positioned. I like to use materials for their honesty and I don't like to mess about with them too much. I play with colour or texture and with industrial processes. A few years ago, I worked with a company that was trying to make bio-resin out of sugar. However it wasn’t something that was ever certified and so the research ended there. In the case of this project, the nearby quarries were an obvious solution, whilst in other public works concrete is a very trustworthy material.

Today we mainly use GRP and steel because when you're making these outdoor works, with the ambition of them lasting for centuries to come, you can’t make them out of rammed earth. In this sense, art is slightly different to architecture because if someone is buying a piece of art, they're expecting it to literally last forever — while nowadays, a lot of buildings have a 20-year lifespan.

KOOZ Your works have been exhibited both inside galleries and in public spaces. And the Animals Were Sold is an intriguing project because it now resides in the Palazzo della Ragione, where the sixty chairs invite visitors to pause and animate the Sala, creating an atmosphere of exchange and connection, of closeness and sharing. You mentioned that some chairs will be donated to the city of Bergamo as a quiet memorial to Covid. What makes memorials powerful for you?

RW I don't want to be a memorial maker. I've often been asked to make proposals for memorials, to which I just simply haven't responded or wanted to. It's something I only engage with when I know I can find the right way of expressing something, or if something has somehow affected me directly so that I can engage with the feeling. Recently, I was asked to make a memorial piece and I decided that the situation was far too present — that you couldn't possibly memorialise anything at the moment. One has to wait until things have settled. The situation that you're memorialising has to be given time in order to understand it — that’s when it becomes powerful.

Bio

Rachel Whiteread was born in 1963 in London, where she lives and works. She studied painting at Brighton Polytechnic, England, from 1982 to 1985, and sculpture at Slade School of Fine Art, England, from 1985 to 1987. Rachel Whiteread’s poignant works explore the imprints of human life on the objects and environments that define our daily existence. In Rachel Whiteread’s sculptures and drawings, everyday settings, objects, and surfaces are transformed into ghostly replicas that are eerily familiar. Through casting, Whiteread makes visible those things that ordinarily go unseen. She frees her subject matter — from domestic objects to entire rooms and buildings — from practical use, suggesting a new permanence, imbued with memory. Whiteread is the recipient of the 1993 Turner Prize, among other awards, and was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2019.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch. She is an architect, researcher and digital curator whose interests lie at the intersection between art, architecture and regenerative practices. In 2015 Federica founded KoozArch with the ambition of creating a space where to research, explore and discuss architecture beyond the limits of its built form. Parallel to her work at KoozArch, Federica is Architect at the architecture studio UNA and researcher at the non-profit agency for change UNLESS where she is project manager of the research "Antarctic Resolution". Federica is an Architectural Association School of Architecture in London alumni.