Alexandra Huddleston

Additional information: Visitors to the exhibition were given a free pamphlet upon entering the space.  The main text of the pamphlet, written by the artist, is reproduced below.

“Welcome and congratulations!

With your presence here, at Streetview, Anderlecht, standing in front of the photographic mural created by me, Alexandra Huddleston, we have now, together, completed the site-specific work “Stratum.”  This ‘together’ was essential, because as you just experienced, your entire process of movement through space, time, and architecture was necessary in order to feel the full impact of the photograph chosen for the mural.  You entered this town house off a side street, walked down the staircase – carefully because it’s steep and narrow – and then entered this small, underground room with its rather low ceiling.  Not until then did you see the mural, and seeing it after your pedestrian entrance, you completed the artwork.

You have descended underground, and all around you, unseen, are the substratum of the city.  Streetview is called ‘street view,’ but here, the view of the street is actually above our heads.  The mural leaves visible the blinds that shade the top of this sunken window.  The image shows the layers of the earth that are generally under our feet, but that have been eroded away, exposing the stratum just below the topsoil.  Of course, this isn’t the view underneath a city.  The scene in this photograph was captured on May 21, 2019 by the side of a country road outside of Assisi, Italy.  However, I, the artist, see no contradiction.

The work is called “Stratum,” purposefully, to call your attention to this point.  Even as the image calls attention to the geologic and architectural substrata under our feet, its medium gathers together an ever-expanding number of layers of space and time.  Perhaps the first, very thin, very delicate, strata were born in my mind on the 12th of April, 2019 when I attended an art opening at Streetview for the first time.  Like you, I entered the townhouse, awkwardly descended the stairway and found myself in this strange little room.  But, as I was enjoying the works on exhibit, in my mind roots were growing as I imagined them piecing through the walls…

So, there is the moment in time and space that the idea was born, the moment in time and space that the camera’s button was pressed,  the moment in time and space when I emailed Marianne and suggested this concept, when I printed the panels for the work, when I first spoke to you about the work, when I began to assemble the panels on the wall, when you received the invitation, and when you entered this space, completing the work…

However, I won’t write ‘finally’ because in our era, there is no finally.  I am already making installation photographs of the work, and you may have already taken a few with your smart phone.  By the time you read this text, the work is already existing in various space-times around the globe as through the medium of the world wide web, people look at these photographs in the bath, or on a tram, and in situations beyond my imagination.  Nonetheless, there is no question in my mind that only those few of you who have walked these last few steps to stand in front of the work, have truly grasped its essence, and in so doing made it whole.

Do I, as the writer and artist, have a particular bias towards the embodied experience?  Absolutely.  In recent years, I have completely embraced the term ‘walking artist,’ because even if not all of my photographs are technically made on a long walk (this one was), I have now walked and photographed so many kilometers that walking has completely overhauled the ethical and aesthetic positions from which I consider the world around me.  By now, it has been over ten years that I’ve been chipping away at this question: How does a visual and philosophical perception of landscape, developed in the course of walking, open up new ways and revive old ways of understanding land and culture, through the medium of photography?  In short, my peripatetic art practice exists in contrast with the climate-controlled, motorized, and virtual ways of being dominant in the developed world.  So, yes!  I have a bias towards the embodied experience!

Nonetheless, this is my first work in which the viewer’s walking, your walking, becomes necessary for the full comprehension and completion of the work.  So, thank you again for coming!  I couldn’t have done it without you.

(written at various points in space and time in the city of Brussels between Sunday August 22nd and Thursday August 26th, 2021)”