Caitlin Berrigan, Unfinished State postcard, 2010–13, helicopter pad at Rachid Karami International Fair Park by Oscar Niemeyer, 1967–75, Tripoli, Lebanon. Courtesy of Caitlin Berrigan and Archive Books.
DPI Professor Caitlin Berrigan has been awarded a grant from the Graham Foundation for her project Unfinished State.
"Narratives of city-branding and surges of global capital have caused waves of real estate development in Berlin and Beirut, two cities that were spatially divided by conflict and have been under reconstruction for decades. Caitlin Berrigan's artist's book strays from official narratives into a shadow landscape of unfinished and vacant structures that remain suspended in a state of incompletion—fixed on the brink of a possible future. Berrigan transcribed a novel onto hundreds of saturated, photographic postcards as an epistolary exchange between Berlin and an emergent landscape of raw, concrete buildings across Lebanon. The ruptured, recompiled novel is accompanied by conversations with artists and architects on practice, social space, and real estate. How do we carve out spaces for future imagination, that nonetheless acknowledge past history? Unfinished State explores how unfulfilled optimism, flows of capital, and shifting social terrains manifest across time through architecture and prismatic landscapes."
The Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts makes project-based grants to individuals and organizations and produces public programs to foster the development and exchange of diverse and challenging ideas about architecture and its role in the arts, culture, and society.