TEST / SITE
Nele Bergmans and Te Palandjian
13-15 January 2024



Almost a year ago, Nele Bergmans and Te Palandjian decided to collaborate on their first site-responsive sculpture. Now, they bring you TEST/ SITE, an experimental exercise in constructing and deconstructing a sculpture over a single evening.
There is a long tradition of bringing land art indoors. In the late 1960s, Robert Smithson staged a series of Nonsite exhibitions that displayed soil and stone from local New Jersey environments within various framing devices. Rather than recreate the form of the monumental land art for which he was famous, Smithson's Nonsites shuffled and abstracted the raw material of the landscapes that he visited alongside his photography of the actual outdoor sites themselves.

With TEST/SITE, Bergmans and Palandjian play with this legacy and the various documentation practices that have accompanied it. During the opening event, they continuously re-assembled a "stacked landscape" sculpture; viewers were invited to participate by photographing this process through the exhibition website and hanging the print-outs from the racks scattered around the gallery.

In the research phase of this project, Bergmans and Palandjian have developed various methods of bonding and embedding natural material to the surface of polyvinyl chloride strips—pioneering, in the spirit of Smithson, a new display apparatus that enables natural landscapes to enter a gallery environment. In this process, the landscape becomes a pigment: the strips used in TEST/SITE will feature crumbled red sandstone and glauconite greens and sourced by Palandjian on a 2024 research trip to Southern Utah; white chalk from the Isle of Portland where both Bergmans and Palandjian have conducted research and trained in stonecarving. In the stacking process, these ingredients intermingle with a series of synthetic materials: industrial breezeblocks and artificial red, yellow, and blue pigments intervene into the landscape's "natural" surfaces.