Ang Li and Lisa Sigal
Lisa Sigal: I was just remembering our studio visit and how interesting your approach was to being at RAIR. And I guess what I was curious about, which I’m always curious about is the way that people write about their work and the way you think about it.
So in your writing about the project All That is Solid, you talked about unpacking the relationship between physical inventory systems and the economies that redistribute waste across the state and national borders. And I’m wondering if, I mean that sounds really, deep and interesting. I’m wondering how you’re actually thinking about that in relation to the work that you made.
Ang Li: I don’t remember if I wrote this in the exit interview, so I might be repeating myself. But one thing that really struck me in the first couple of weeks when I was walking around the recycling center with Billy and Lucia, was when Billy said something about the material memory when he was talking about the bales of materials that would be coming out of the industrial balers- he said that materials that have good memory, make good bales. I realized he was talking about, and I think I heard a couple of other guys at the recycling center mentioned this too, that they were using the term ‘material memory’ to refer to the compressive capacity of something, which is a really practical function. But then the thing that really fascinated me was that the bales like kind of represent hints of past functions or production histories or mass produced objects that had been kind of scrambled in a different way. So they held a different kind of memory. That was sort of interesting. I was really curious about how a lot of the kind of material systems that you see at RAIR, from the piles of things to the blocks of things, hold this kind of a double function. That they’re going to have economic units and they’re practical units made for moving things or repricing things, but they also have a memory function in a more cultural sense. I think that that kind of funny contradiction, that they could have held these two meanings, was something that was always really interesting to me from the beginning.
LS: Right. It is a funny contradiction because it could lean one way or the other. Like I’m thinking especially of metal, which when compressed like that it has a reference to what it is or what it was in service for. But then the beauty of the compression is that it completely changes its function and becomes esthetic in some way. I’m wondering if the same thing happened for you because it did seem like there was an interesting way in which the metal really became transformed, but where maybe the material that you were using didn’t quite do that. Would you say that it leans more towards referring to its material memory than in transforming it?
AL: I think that the foam obviously functions in a really different way from the metal in that it doesn’t take on an imprint of something else. And I think when I was making them, I was trying to categorize all the pieces in different ways. So there are the kind of extruded profiles that you see that kind of came out of a mold. Like its made in a strangely similar way to a cast object and it took on the profile of whatever object it was packaging. And so there were these forms that I wanted to keep in the piece that you could still recognize. These profiles that look like furniture or packaging or electronics packaging. And there are other pieces that were more generic, like sheet stock or large blocks of things that we ended up breaking down into these kinds of rock like pieces. I was trying to, and I think this is still an ongoing part of the project, catalog all these pieces in some way- going from the most recognizable of forms to the most formless. From objects to just material stock. I haven’t fully done yet, but I was trying to figure out how to work with the pieces I was finding every day.
LS: So inside of the pillars you might have some rock like abstract forms and then on the outside there would be these extruded profiles you were talking about?
AL: Yea, when I was working at RAIR, it was just this sort of intuitive process, but then I had the opportunity to work on another version of this project in Chicago later that summer. I had a group of students from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago who were working with me. So I had to figure out how to communicate how to make these to someone else. We started by trying to sketch through all of the types of pieces of foam that we were getting and the ones that we had to break down in some way and the ones where we’re preserving. That was when this kind of interest came out, when I had to think about how to talk about it to someone else about it.
LS: When you say that you’re going to continue to like archive or catalog these forms, in what capacity with you do this?
AL: I think potentially drawings could be kind of interesting, like material catalog drawings.
LS: It seemed like your project was in-between a kind of material research, like the forensics of the materials themselves, and an architectural vocabulary and also minimalist sculpture (judging from the photographs from your exhibit in Chicago). I’m wondering which aspects became most compelling to you and when?
AL: When I started I was trying to think about how a site like RAIR could initiate a really different notion of material research than how we typically talk about it in the field of architecture, but also like the different way of thinking about industry partnerships or industry sponsorships. I feel like the model of material research that I’m familiar with from architecture has a lot of emphasis on the performance of the material and its aesthetic characteristics and structural performance or strength. And at RAIR, obviously, you talk about materials in this whole other way. It’s about how they are, how they move around, how much space they take, how much they weigh, how they’re categorized, and they take on this different kind of agency. Like you’re almost designing for the materials. And so I think for me the tricky thing is often when I present this project within an architecture context, there’s always this question of ‘where does it go next?’ ’is this a scalable system?’ ‘can you now mass produce these blocks?’ ‘are they used in a building context?’. And to me that was never really the interest behind the project, but it was more interesting to think of them as a different way of diagramming the waste stream that I’ve seen, that they were quantifying the amount of foam that was turning up every day. In the Chicago piece, I had these graphics on a screen in the gallery that were cycling through all the numbers and statistics about EPS foam: There’s 30% of it by volume in landfills. 80% of EPS foam used is never recycled. There’s something really abstract about these numbers and figures that you never understand. The bales to me ,material research angle, isn’t necessarily to make a new material or a new kind of material application, but really think about the stories that materials are able to tell. I was thinking about the concept of proxy data, like in like tree rings, like in climatology where you read physical materials and their attributes to be able to kind of get a sense of larger cycles or larger influences behind them.
LS: That’s so interesting. Do you think that you could talk at length more about this idea of the proxy data? That sounds really interesting, but I’m not sure how it would work.
AL: I’m not totally sure how it would work either. For the Chicago piece, I kept trying to quantify how much foam was inside a column so that I could give people indication of what this was a scale to. Like this represents the amount that a person would use or throw away in a year. But it didn’t lend itself to that kind of precision. I couldn’t really figure out how much foam I actually had because it was based on the volume and that depends on how much you compress it. So I don’t quite have a good answer for that yet.
LS: I would imagine just walking through them, that somehow the physical experience of the foam itself might then allow somebody to imagine the quantity of foam that that could exist in our culture right now, given the amount of shipping and the containing one does of products. It’s kind of a simple equation of just like physicality that might offer some sense of its impact.
AL: I think the other thing I wanted to highlight was the weight to volume ratio. That is that they’re so much lighter than you expect them to be. I could lift up the columns really easily and I could put them onto casters so people can push them around and they sort of keep running when you push them. So that was a part of it too.
LS: I saw those images but I didn’t quite understand what they were meant to function as.
AL: Around the same time that I was wrapping stuff up at RAIR, I came across all these images from the Dow chemical company’s historic image collection that were promotional photographs for styrofoam insulation and they were from the fifties and sixties. They are these amazing black and white images. They were these photos of models that they hired, holding entire blocks of styrofoam above their heads. There’s one of this beautiful woman in a bathing suit, lying on a block of styrofoam in water. It’s really surreal that they’re a part of a promotional campaign. Branding styrofoam as this miracle material that defied all sorts of earthly constraints. So I guess there’s something about the piece that wanted to and capture that shock value. Like, ‘look how large this thing is’ and how light it is- but inverted, because those same qualities makes it a really big problem in the recycling industry.
LS: But that material does wind up in landfill.
AL: Yea, it’s just so unprofitable to recycle because you have to break down so much of it to make a profit.
LS: It sounds like such interesting material, almost like propaganda. And you could see how companies would use that kind of propaganda when the material was first discovered or was going to be used. But I’m wondering if you would consider making that even more prominent if you were to make another installation of that piece?
AL: Yeah. I have this opportunity coming up in September to do something else with this piece at MOCAD, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit. And I have been really struggling to think about what to do next because there’s the iteration of the project at RAIR and then there is the larger columns in Chicago. And I feel like the next phase of the project should be more analytical, maybe less about the making of large objects and more about somehow either making drawings or animations in some way of this material. To me it is the optics of it that’s interesting. There’s also
a lot of it in the building industry. I found these photographs of geofoam foundations underneath millennium park in Chicago. That show the entire park is padded out underneath with geofoam foundations. Foam is also a material that has strange invisibility. There’s so much of it in the built environment but we don’t see it because it’s always hidden beneath things or it’s used as a substitute for something else. I am really interested in kind of doing another version of the project that begins to really talk into that, but I haven’t quite figured out what that should be.
LS: Well that’ll be interesting because it does seem to veer in and out of these different aspects. It sounds like, almost ironically, that the architectural function
that you were talking about seems to be the least interesting to you. Like its use in buildings or its reuse. I’m wondering if that is true or are you interested in trying to tap into that conversation about the built environment?
AL: I mean, I think less in a solutions based way. Thinking about a new application for it and more about whether we could bring it into light more. In the building industry foam feels like a material that is actually used in great quantities and we never talk or think about it. It’s almost a kind of placeholder or like a non-material. It’s used a lot also for mold making and prototyping- used as proxy for something else. We also don’t think about it often because it’s so easy to move around and manipulate and fairly inexpensive. It’s seen as a thing that can cover a great area without much cost. And so I’m interested in playing around with or challenging that perception.
LS: That would be interesting. Especially because you said, it is an invisible material, so people are unaware of how it can be either a proxy for something else or just that invisible material under the ground. Do you know what percentage of the material is reused?
AL: I think less than like 10%. Apparently it makes up 30% of most landfills in the US but not by weight, but by volume because it doesn’t weigh anything. For the piece at RAIR, I got all of the materials on site, but for the piece in Chicago we actually went around searching for a foam from a bunch of recycling centers. It was hard to find recycling centers that worked with styrofoam because they wouldn’t even be taking styrofoam. There are only a handful of them that do. I’ve also tried to interview if you have these recycled centers in the Boston area and most of them are larger recycling centers that take it on as a goodwill gesture because it’s not profitable as a market. Or a lot of, and this is a contested thing, recycling drop-off stations in Chicago are run by Dart and so it’s a ‘take back our foam’ kind of effort. But that’s more like an image campaign than actually making any quantifiable difference.
LS: And what about the physical form as an art object? Has it become more interesting to you since doing the pieces? Is it something that you’re going to continue to use, are you interested in the aesthetics of it?
AL: I think that I’m really interested in the aggregate aesthetic of it. But the thing that’s tricky is they’re not very durable pieces. The plastic around the bales starts getting loose after a while. Even in the process of moving them, they’re really easily damaged and they start getting a little floppy. At RAIR that makes a lot of sense because it’s about making these pieces that you return back into the waste stream and they are supposed to have a short lifespan. But moving forward into a different context it starts to become a little tricky. So for the Chicago pieces, it was a fairly short show, only up for about two and a half months. And now the columns are in storage and it was just the most enormous effort to get them out of the gallery into two vans. I tried like three different storage units and nothing would fit because they’re too tall. So there was something kind of comical about that whole process of just trying to move these like things that don’t weigh anything.
AL: It started with an interest in the form and the material itself. But I ended up feeling like I should’ve filmed the whole process- this kind of comedy moving these bales around. There was crying at the storage facility at some point because we’ve gone through a third unit and still wouldn’t fit. And the whole reason of storing them, for a fairly great cost, is so I could display them again in the show in September. There’s something funny about that and it seems to also speak to the fact that it’s such a difficult material to recycle because so much effort is involved in moving it, storing it, processing it.
LS: Right. Well that kind of relates back to the first thing you said about what Billy spoke about. The material memory and how a material that has good memory has
certain attributes that would signify what it could be used for. I was going to ask if you had any regrets about your approach but it sounds like you’re in a really nice position to be able to continue to think through these different ways of using the material and/ or communicating about it. So maybe that’s not an appropriate question for you.
AL: I think less regrets but I do have a lot of questions about how far this can go. Like, do I just work on styrofoam for the next three years? I walked into RAIR, and I think everyone has this feeling when they go there, that there is just an abundance of different materials and you want to work with everything. The piles of concrete they had out back- I wanted to do something with that. And somehow I think I felt a little bit like I got locked into this one thing and I need it to chase it to the end. I’m starting to wonder how some of the interests behind the project or the observations that RAIR could start to inform another project using a different material. Like concrete or rubble is something that to me has some weird parallels with the EPS foam.
LS: I think that that sounds like a really interesting way of opening it up so the questions are not just lodged in one material, which it sounds like you’re beginning to dislike.
AL: Yeah, I spent a lot of time with it!
LS: It sounds like this project opened up a different approach to working for you?
AL: Yeah, I feel like Billy and Lucia are also just a really large part of the project. And I know, of course, that it is a piece that I worked on on my own, but I feel like thats where the material research part comes in. Just hearing them talk about how the material is being moved around the yard or how things were valued and that aspect of it. I feel like that’s something I hope to take on to other work.
LS: Yeah, it’s quite practical in some ways.
AL: Yeah. I’ve been trying to bring some of this thinking into a couple of studios that I am teaching at Northeastern, to masters of architecture students. We were able to take a group of students to RAIR- they got the facilities tour and then we set up this half day workshop where they had to work with materials on site. We gave them a really simple premise, they had to make seating devices that considered ad-hoc forms of architectural assembly. So it had to be a way of putting materials together that could be taken apart again afterwards.
LS: Oh wow. That’s great. And how did it work out?
AL: It was very quick, noon until five and it was freezing out. It was right before Thanksgiving. So they couldn’t do everything they wanted to, but there were a couple of interesting beginnings. And I think it really forced the architecture students who are used to thinking about a form or an object or like a permanent final outcome to move away from that to instead give their work up and think about these more temporary and time-based forms of assembly.
LS: Interesting. And the next iteration in Detroit, is that in an art space or is it in a different kind of museum?
AL: Well it’s at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit, which from what I remember is an industrial building that’s been converted into an art space. I haven’t gotten images yet of the gallery that we’re going to be in, but it I think will be a less precious kind of gallery space. So the columns will be moved there and then I’m also interested in having either a series of drawings or animated images or something.
LS: Well, it really sounds fascinating. I’d be very curious if it would materialize as a kind of drawing project.
AL: I think maybe we talked about this in our first visit at RAIR but I left that project behind at some point. I wanted to figure out some way to take notes so that all the things that you see at RAIR- just how the trucks would move around the tipping yard or how things were weighed and priced. And so that’s another kind of series of drawings I’d be really interested to try to make. To rethink what a working drawing is. In architecture we think of the working drawing as like a shop drawing, but whether it could be a giant that captured larger scale processes and material handling.
LS: That sounds really interesting. And it seems like being given the opportunity to work within a system that gathers materials that were once used but no longer valued has offered you a different way of thinking about making things and building architectural memory. And it sounds like you are the perfect candidate for that residency.
AL: I think for anyone who does it, it’s a life changing experience. The experience is so unusual to how I usually work.
LS: Do you think that without a residency like that would you have visited waste plants on your own or done that kind of research?
AL: What attracted me to RAIR in the first place was that a few projects I’d worked on in the past, were always interested in looking at the production workflows of another industry. I worked on a few ceramic projects that looked at the architectural terracotta production manufacturers and involved speaking with them a lot throughout the process of the project. So I think I’d like to figure out a way of working that carries that forward. On the note that we were talking about earlier, about taking the lessons from RAIR into another material- I’m working on this public art project in Boston, for the city, that looks at potentially working with concrete rubble to do something that speaks to Boston’s history of landfill. Using construction and demolition waste to make new land. I haven’t really figured out how to start yet because I haven’t been able to visit like a recycled concrete aggregate site or a rumble yard. Something like that could maybe maybe really help.
LS: Yeah, in some ways your project at RAIR is like the perfect preview for that because without the didactic information that piece exists in a certain way. And to think about construction and demolition and concrete rubble, but then what other kinds of histories will you manifest on the material itself? I think that in this project at RAIR it seemed like you leaned more towards the aesthetics than the didactic and so it’ll be interesting to see how that becomes part of a form.
AL: I’m actually really glad to hear you say that- this way of reading it in two ways. Because I also write a little bit in my practice, partly out of necessity.I have a publication obligation from my university. But I’ve been thinking a lot about how generally architectural designers publish pieces about their own work. And to me that’s always been a kind of strange model, to write about your own projects. I kept thinking about this piece, whether it’s an opportunity to have a research part of the project that ends up in papers and other things. And the making of it is parallel to it and they can exist together but they don’t have to directly speak to each other.