Topp & Dubio Remodeling Heterotopia

You’ve missed it. (Or perhaps you haven’t?) For a moment there wave­ringly existed a space-double, a twin-space. It unfol­ded on the street Westeinde, The Hague, in a space that was offered by another space. And for a moment there solidly existed a real space: a full-size copy of the Bricks Space, located on Aird’s Lane, Glasgow (part of the commer­cial gallery The Modern Insti­tute, a fixture of the Glas­wegian art scene for 27 years). The moment, admit­tedly, lasted awhile: the exhi­bition began expan­ding on the 24th of May and implo­ded into a vani­shing point on Sep­tember 30, 2024. It was named “Remo­deling Hetero­topia”, borrowing Fou­cault’s well-known term of art for the foldings of place within space, those self-shaped niches embed­ded like hair folli­cles in the tissue of the world.

To create the simula­crum the artist duo Topp & Dubio scaven­ged the internet for photo­graphs of the interior of the Aird’s Lane Bricks Space. They then stret­ched, shor­tened, pat­ched them up with grafts of brick skin and prin­ted them life-size to cover the walls of a space they had 24/7 access to: the host, a project space under the name “… ism”, which happens to also be a sort of ante­chamber to Topp’s house.

During those three-and-a-half months that their hetero­topia existed, it hosted a total of twenty-one exhi­bitions. I visited four-and-a-half of them. Each instal­lation was a light propo­sition that was con­ceived of and reali­zed over the week and open to visitors during the week­end. At the time I was reading a bio­graphy of the Japa­nese poet Matsuo Bashō, and I think the format of “Remo­deling Hetero­topia” can be compared to a form of linked verse known as “haikai no renga”, a type of spon­taneous colla­borative poetry in which each verse wittily builds on the pre­vious one. Each curatorial iteration of the project seemed infor­med by (the rem­nants of) the pre­ceding exhibition and showed both work by Topp & Dubio them­selves as well as by guest artists.

Under­neath the make­shift execution I could always discern a seemingly naïve yet compre­hensive logic. The printed doors opposite the entrance are super­imposed on actual doors, which lead to Topp’s living-room, rather than a roughly paved back­street in Glasgow. Yet I could feel that space, too, behind the wall, because it exists in my mind. Every acknow­ledge­ment of the one space, mental or physical, tingles into being the exi­stence of the other. Above the doors is a window, behind which ivy leaves are turning brown; but it is summer, and there are no leaves behind the window, because there is no window there. The two rusty nails ham­mered into the window frame: one changes aspect as I change position, the other remains constant, the same from every angle of the room. It’s clear Topp & Dubio had a lot of fun hiding their Easter eggs, and now and then I feel the sense of endear­ment you can get, seeing someone chuckle at their own joke.

Exhibition #11: “A Notion is an Idea” consists of small models of bill­boards that have words painted on them, words that are verbally explained on other small bill­boards, whose text is in turn defined on other ones. The sequence suppo­sedly begins with the word “idea”, although arguably that word is tagged by the word “notion” in the title, which is further men­tioned on one of the bill­boards. This referen­tial chain reflects on a smaller scale the concep­tual machina­tions behind the larger art project. The artists seem quite aware of the game they’re playing, refer­ring, diverting, alluding, eluding the visitor until they lose grasp of what’s what. Dubio excitedly told me about a neigh­bor and faith­ful visitor of the West­einde project space, who was pretty upset when he glanced through ...ism’s win­dows and saw a crum­bling brick wall instead of the antique wooden panel­ling that used to line his local gallery.

The last few times I visited The Brick Space it was evening; the street was dark, light shining from the interior of the space through the two windows on either side of the entrance. Peeping through them, my gaze struck those fake brick walls. Exhibition #16 consisted of a screening: Hitch­cock’s brick-rich Rear Window projected onto The Brick Space’s scenery of printed bricks. Rear Window is all about peering out from within the confines of Jimmy Stewart’s apart­ment at the brick walls of the neigh­boring buildings and the worlds that unfold behind them. If, like Stewart's tele­scope, The Brick Space’s street-facing windows are pointing out, then the image projec­ted onto its retinas is that of the Aird’s Lane Bricks Space. The glassy lenses take in the Glaswegian gallery and, in a camera obscura-like twist, let it fall onto ...ism’s walls, turning upside-down both the original Bricks Space and the host-space.

Usually doubles bring with them the uncanny, but I got the impres­sion that Topp & Dubio have managed to replace the uncanny with the funny. The play between these bill­board-word-models, between The Brick Space’s multiple-spaces-in-one, operates on the same model as that of much verbal humour. Word­play departs from one meaning to another, holding a measu­red gap between both. This diver­gence creates a space, between the expected and the substi­tution, in which the two incongru­ous mean­ings waver­ingly coexist and can converge or even become confused. It’s into this gap that the unwit­ting neighbor of …ism stumbled: the space not only bet­ween what is present and absent, but also bet­ween what is expec­ted and substi­tuted, projec­ted and con­cealed. But I like it when wor(l)ds split or glide together.

In a letter to The Modern Institute published as part of the final exhibition “Vanishing Point”, Topp & Dubio say that they disco­vered the Aird’s Lane Bricks Space online during the Covid-19 lock­downs and “directly regarded it [as] an inacces­sible space for [their] art practice”. It made me question the (in)ac­cessi­bility of their own project. Because “Remo­deling Hetero­topia’s” concep­tual play is based on its own under­lying logic, and conse­quently requires from the visitor an approach adhering to this logic, the exhi­bition operates like a closed circuit. This doesn’t mean that Topp & Dubio in turn have created work that is inac­cessi­ble to the visitor. Rather, it feels like it’s somehow the oppo­site of inac­cessi­ble: somewhat inexita­ble. Minding the gap, you can easily step into the world of Topp & Dubio’s work, but stepping out, into your own interpre­tation of it, proves more difficult.

In “Remo­deling Hetero­topia” the artists set out to explore mean­ings and interre­lations, specifi­cally those of an exhi­bition, an artwork, an art space. Each subject, each sugges­tion is poten­tially repur­posed by the next, consis­tently establi­shing a space in which relations shift, defini­tions falter and meaning is perpe­tually redeter­mined. Even the series of twenty-one exhi­bitions as a whole is a singular expres­sion within a succes­sion of itera­tions, articu­lating one possible meaning of “an exhi­bition” to Topp & Dubio’s practice. Tracing their artistic and curato­rial choices reveals a concep­tual struc­ture that spans all levels of the project. The project is aware of exami­ning itself as it shapes itself. The conclu­sion of its investi­gation, which it never reaches, is gene­rated out of itself, making the project auto­poietic and ulti­mately self-contai­ned.