Spleenhouse | Marcel O'Gorman

Spleenhouse exists at the curious point of intersection between the LaSalle greenhouses and the Paris arcades depicted by Charles Baudelaire in Paris Spleen. Spleenhouse involves deconstructing the greenhouse on a French farmstead in LaSalle, and installing it in the city of Windsor. This uprooting and relocation is symbolic, a sort of architectural revenge or "spatial nemesis" in which the greenhouse, squeezed off its rural land by urban flight, re-establishes itself in the city responsible for its demise. As part of a gallery installation, the greenhouse will maintain its original purpose of fostering young vegetable plants, but it will take on a new social and artistic dimension with the aid of digital video and simple location. The structure itself is made of wood, translucent plastic, and rusted iron pipes. In the gallery, these pipes will be mounted in concrete blocks, which will serve as a foundation. The entire structure will sit on a bed of black dirt imported from a LaSalle farm. Video footage will be projected inside the greenhouse with media projectors located outside of the structure. The footage consists of several hours of ongoing interviews conducted since 2001 with the few remaining French farmers of LaSalle. The footage, which might be viewed as an ethnographic study, documents not only the history of LaSalle, but also its unique French dialect, which, like the farmland, is on the verge of extinction. As the farmers tell their stories, the video provides critical light within the greenhouse, fostering the growth of seeds planted in wooden flats. The voices of the farmers are supplemented by a muted, ambient soundtrack provided by the folk musician Marcel Beneteau and the techno DJ, Richie Hawtin (Plasticman), two artists with roots in LaSalle.

The thematic clashing of country and city, nature and technology, combined with the heat of the greenhouse and the scent of dirt and vegetation will provide an uncanny, visceral environment for the meeting of past and present, rural and urban, agrarian and bourgeois, rustic and academic. These are precisely the elements that the artist is trying to reconcile through this project. The tone of this project is one of nostalgia in its most precise sense. Nostalgia, from the Greek terms nostos and algos, involves the agony to return home, and/or the agony of returning home. For this reason, the ultimate destination of Spleenhouse, a ghostly, diaphanous vessel, is in France, to a culture that spawned the birth of the greenhouse, but eventually terminated a family's practice of gardening.