Marinda Vandenheede Belgian, b. 1976

Concrete wire normally carries a weight it never shows, hidden inside concrete, the skeleton of a building that is never seen. Here it lies exposed and carries something else instead: a row of punch cards, folded like an accordion, pierced and slid onto the thick, rusted core.

Two systems meet that were never made for each other. One heavy and structural, built to carry and to disappear. The other thin and perforated, once a language of instruction, now only fragile cardboard. By sliding the card over the iron, the fragile borrows something of the strength of the heavy, even as that strength remains foreign to its nature. The cardboard bends, folds, gives way where the iron stays rigid.

At one end, the wire curls into a loop, a gesture that holds nothing and closes nothing. No knot, no lock, more a breath taken by the metal itself, a moment where even the strongest material lets itself drift from its function.

The title carries that tension further. What looks like it should collapse under its own fragility instead becomes self-supporting, upright, holding its own shape without a base, a pedestal, or anything outside itself to lean on. — Marinda Vandenheede