---

The work of Valérian Goalec (b. 1986) starts with the observation of utilitarian objects, their shape and their location in those public and transitory spaces we all encounter in our daily lives. Mass-produced artifacts and devices, these objects seem to be designed to go unnoticed. However, they take on a poetically absurd sculptural quality once Goalec isolates them from their original context, acquiring another status as they are specifically arranged or copied in different materials and scales.

"If space-junk is the human debris that litters the universe, junk-space is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built ... product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout. Modernization had a rational program: to share the blessings of science, universally. Junkspace is its apotheosis, or meltdown... Although Junkspace seems an aberration, but it is the essence, the main thing … the product of an encounter between escalator and air-conditioning, conceived in an incubator of Sheetrock (all three missing from the history books) … Junkspace thrives on design, but design dies in Junkspace.

There is no form, only proliferation … Regurgitation is the new creativity; instead of creation, we honour, cherish, and embrace manipulation … Superstrings of graphics, transplanted emblems of franchise and sparkling infrastructures of light, LEDs, and video describe an authorless world beyond anyone’s claim, always unique, utterly unpredictable, yet intensely familiar."
(Rem Koolhaas, 'Junkspace' 2001

---

---

Sydenham 161 Food+Drink, 161 Kirkdale, London SE26 4QJ