Absence in Accumulation
Francesca Bogani Amadori & Henry Lämsä

2025
multimedia installation: video, soundscape, plaster, granite, sand, asphalt, and clay.

00:08:00, dimensions variable


The work imagines geographies where the city expands to the point of eroding its own layers. It escalates processes of accumulation, extraction, and displacement from a visual, sonic, and tactile perspective.

By working with materials found around construction sites, such as gravel, sand, cement, and asphalt, sculptures intertwine the scale of debris with the city’s topography, creating imprints of abstract spaces. A video expands on these forms by using elevation data and 3D modeling to construct surfaces that oscillate between real and imagined landscapes.

The visual language echoes the sculptural process, playing with positive and negative presence, erosion, and scale. It narrates the city’s development from the perspective of its materials in five chapters: I. Emergence, II. Saturation, III. Stratification, IV. Flattening, and V. Absence. The soundscape, composed of field recordings and digital sounds, gives voice to this narrative with sonic textures that condense until the point where they slowly dissolve, giving space for near silence.

The audience is invited to consider absence not as emptiness, but as a residue of accumulation. The installation confronts the violence of urban saturation, gesturing toward the deep time of geological recovery: a way of reimagining spatial memory.

 




Absence in Accumulation, installation view, Asbestos Art Space, Helsinki. 








Absence in Accumulation, sculpture view, Asbestos Art Space, Helsinki.
    







               

    




Absence in Accumulation, video stills.



Mark