in-between-inside

in-between-inside Curtain, Wallpaper, Dimensions variable (2024).

The Always Middles Showroom, Software, (2023).

Steel off-cut and analysis.

Textures

Textures

Textures

Textures

Textures

Textures

Textures

Textures

Textures

Textures

Textures

Textures

3D Scans

3D Scans

3D Scans

3D Scans

3D Scans

3D Scans

3D Scans

3D Scans

3D Scans

3D Scans

3D Scans

3D Scans

Wallpaper

Wallpaper

Wallpaper

Wallpaper

Wallpaper

Wallpaper

in-between-inside (2021-) began when a steel off-cut from a metal shop outside of Sliven arrived in my mailbox. Cut in a decorative shape, an analysis of its material contents revealed it as a composite of various elements with iron. I wondered about its past lives, the elemental kisses and divorces of material components, and where this matter had traveled from and where it might go. In a sense, the off-cut had always moved and changed; a diasporic entity in the middle of a continuous immigrant journey. It reminded me of my own itinerant childhood moving between continents.

Over the course of months I 3D scanned the off-cut in different places and postures, commemorating my custodianship by saving its rusted surfaces to digital memory. The textures retrieved in the scanning process also seemed to be in a middle: images ready to travel to other places, to have encounters, and to act on their own. For Materialities of/from the Edge, I cultivated the machine-made images of the rusted metal into digital wallpapers by aging, obscuring, submerging or warping them. Maybe I was a geologist or an artisan for a simulated material world, extracting and processing matter from the off-cut as a misremembered source. These materials masqueraded as tiles, stone, and wood that adorned the rooms in a downloadable game environment, The Always Middle Showroom. The Always Middle became a generous lens for seeing the life cycle, movement, transmutation and exchanges of material heritage between states of matter.

In Ecologies of Prehod, I translated digital textures from the game environment into the physical surfaces of wallpapering and a curtain that enclose a niche at Swimming Pool Projects in Sofia. Defying orientation like the digital spaces that preceded it, I recalled quotidian textile patterns and faux materialities influenced by Soviet- and Prehod-era domestic interiors. The off-cut’s misremembered surface continues to circulate in the game, in the gallery, and beyond as made-to-order interior finishes found through www.middles.supply. It seems that heritage is slippery; as much memory as invention.

Photographs by Yana Lozeva, courtesy of OFF-SITE.

Special Thanks to Boris Angelov and Viktoria Draganova.

EXHIBITIONS

"Materialities of/from the Edge", Curated by OFF-SITE, www.off-site.space (2023).

"Ecologies of Prehod", Curated by OFF-SITE, Swimming Pool Projects, Sofia, Bulgaria (2024).

VISIT

https://middles.supply/

https://swimmingpoolprojects.org/projects/ecologies-of-prehod_66a0e22332323038bd00015f

https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/619821/off-siteecologies-of-prehod/

SAM GHANTOUS

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SAM GHANTOUS

sam at samtous.wtf

Updated August 2024