TRACE

TRACE revisits the site of an earlier Downsbrough video, A] PART (2009). The location for both works, Brussels’s iconic Citroen garage, opened to great fanfare in 1934 as the largest automobile service center in Europe. Dubbed “a cathedral of steel and glass,” the modernist monument had a showroom 21 meters high, a rounded glass curtain wall that extended from the ground floor to the roof, and an interior roadway that wended its way from the entrance to the top floor.

The garage made an ideal subject for Downsbrough. The bones of the building—its structural columns and girders—were visible across and, from certain points of view, between the expansive concrete floors of the open-plan interior, as were the gridded metal guardrails installed on every level. These architectural elements visually echo the spare formal vocabulary Downsbrough employed in his drawings, books, and sculptural works and the framing devices he used in his photographs and moving images. Thus they serve as reminders that his artistic language grew out of a formative and abiding interest in architecture. The building’s glazed curtain wall, yet another gridded surface, offered sweeping views of the city beyond, effectively situating the structure in its urban context while framing countless specificities within that urban landscape. It should be noted that the exterior of the Citroen garage is never shown in either TRACE or A] PART, yet in both works, window views reveal this temple of architectural and automotive innovation hemmed in by public roads designed for vehicles like the very ones it showcased and promoted.

In the years between the making of the two videos, the garage was transformed from an industrial workplace into a vacant shell awaiting conversion into a museum of modern and contemporary art and architecture. The earlier work, A] PART, shot partly from the passenger seat of a car driven through the facility after working hours, begins in pitch-darkness at the bottom of the indoor entrance ramp. Visibility improves as the camera approaches the dim light of a rainy day filtering through windows and the skylit roof, yet much remains sharply silhouetted in contre-jour. The shiny parked vehicles aligned on the interior roadway—the jewels in the French automaker’s architectural crown—have relatively little claim on the camera’s attention. Rather, prolonged scrutiny is given to eye-catching but random-seeming things: an area of stained pavement that in close-up resembles an abstract watercolor or a painting from Warhol’s Oxidation series; a massive apartment building scanned through a window in a tracking shot that lasts a full minute; and a complicated traffic intersection, also shot from a window (this time, by an unmoving camera), through which traffic moves with choreographed precision. Repeatedly, the camera returns to the weblike intricacy of the garage’s roof trusses, which read like line drawings in space. Human sightings are few, and except for a few passages of ambient sound, the video is mostly silent. The work opens with the word AND on a black screen, followed seconds later by the phrase IN TIME, and ends with A] PART, also on a black screen. TRACE, made with a drone-mounted camera and accompanied by a quietly pensive musical soundtrack, explores the same architectural interior, now stripped of its original function and most of its industry-specific fixtures and furnishings. Although the camera begins by following the route taken by the car in the earlier video, it’s soon clear that the drone is forging its own course. That course is challenging to map—sharp scene cuts make spatial relations hard to infer—but thrilling to follow. Low to the ground at first, the camera passes alongside what appear to be discrete batches of dismantled equipment—or possibly deliveries of new replacements—neatly arranged on bare cement floors. On the top level the camera passes over wide gaps between sections of empty, concrete-slab floors, to giddying effect. Ascending vertically, it takes the full measure of a scruffy metal strut that rises from the dark lower levels to the luminous reaches of the rafters while dividing the full-screen image neatly in half, thanks to the viewing angle.

It’s tempting to give the stalwart strut a metaphorical interpretation, especially as it’s presented just prior to the initially exhilarating finale. In that last sequence, the camera glides through a gaping hole in an interior brick wall—an exciting viewing experience—and emerges into an expansive, window-lined space whose attributes—a debris-strewn floor, new materials neatly stacked, a small utilitarian vehicle, and pieces of heavy equipment—suggest both dismantlement and renovation. Here, as everywhere the camera has traveled in the former garage, there isn’t a soul in sight, and the only movement is the camera’s own: the surroundings seem frozen in time. The scene dissolves to the sound of a single, sustained piano note—the same note on which the video begins—and is followed by a black screen inscribed with the phrase AND / RETURN TO PLACE AS TIME, which brings TRACE to a close.

The musical soundtrack heightens the work’s emotional resonance. Alternately wary, portentous, and plaintive, single piano notes are heard in isolation, or in short sequences, or combined with a few other notes in simple, chordless phrases, always in a minor key. The sonic atmosphere that results is elegiac, underlining the poignancy of this architectural portrait that serves as a final farewell.

written by Sarah McFadden