Vanishing Houses - an artistic interpretation

At Matti Sirvio Art Galleria, Jawharat Al Shatti, the current work on display is titled Forma II - a contemporary sculpture exhibition.

Adjacent to the main hall is a dark room which hosts an exhibition by the team from GUTech. Their project includes the digital tools used for the video presentation of the sculpture they made on campus. The seating arrangement is part of the project, in fact when the viewer enters the room one has to remove the shoes and once in, the individual is surrounded by black curtains.

Once the viewer sits on the arranged boxes, he or she also becomes part of the sculpture project. “As architects and as planners they are always interested in the environment and according to what we see directly in Oman is that there is a very rich culture of traditional houses. Unfortunately, we are going to see it disappear and that is because of the material. Most of the old houses in the villages are made out of mud,” said Prof Ercan Agirbas, Dean at GUTech, Architect and Urban Planner.

“When you build a house from mud, and it is exposed to sun and rain again and again, after a couple of decades it disappears. But you get rid of this problem by making everything in concrete. This is in our opinion not the right solution because with it the beauty is also vanishing."

According to him, the beauty of the house lives with the family, however, the next generation may not want to live in the same structure, but the beauty of the mud houses remains even if they are abandoned. And this is what the architects wanted to highlight. “We wanted to make this beauty visible with our video installation where my colleague, Gazmend Kalemi, who had stayed in Oman for 10 years, had spent time drawing and sketching these vanishing villas, houses and villages,” explained Ercan Agirbas.

Parallel to this work, the team of architects from GUTech, consisting of Hadiya al Qasmi, Habiba al Harrasi and Fatma al Balushi led by Ercan Agirbas, has a project of video installation, but in reality the visitor becomes part of the sculpture project.

“Sculpture and video may not go very well at first, but in our case it flows well because the video art piece is sculpture. Even the projector is part of the sculpture. So what we did first was to build the nature,” he explained.

He said the first thing was to understand the nature.

“We wanted to make it visible in the loop of first being the photography, so we built the topography for about three to four minutes. That is why our title has 135 million years, 7 months, 3 weeks, 20 days, 6 hours, 8 minutes, 45 seconds.

"135 million years is during the Jurassic Period, when tectonic plates moved the most, so after building the environment, we had the phase of building the houses and this was portrayed with use of sugar cubes,” he noted.

He said that they chose sugar purposely as they were going to exhibit it in the dark room.

“We were wondering what is the best brightest material we could use and sugar was ideal as it is a sign of our current society - sugar is in everything although it is not healthy, people want it,” the architect pointed out.

Sugar is also manmade.

With the sugar cubes they made their houses and the whole village.

“The village could be anywhere in Oman and the last part of this art piece was that we let the houses and villages represented by sugar cubes disappear by rain,” he explained.

The houses vanish but topography remains the same. He explained that this depicts the possibility to rebuild it all over again.

“It is a fictionary site that we created as a model. The topography was made of boards that are typically used by architects to represent topography as well as to depict mountains and other features. We used many techniques, old and new. For example, the laser cuts gave very sharp edges to create the topography.”