Dismantling Architecture and Industry with Greg Jager in Sicily for “Bitume”

Rome-based artist Greg Jager is “dismantling” the forms of architecture in much the same way that modern graffiti writers have been “deconstructing” the letter form in the last decade. The results have great similarities, but a careful eye will detect the original source possibly.

Greg Jager. *“Dismantle”*. Bitume Festival. Ragusa, Italy. (photo courtesy of the artist)

For comparison you may take a look at Sweden/Brooklyn artist, muralist and graff writer Rubin415, who evolved his 90s graffiti style into one that interprets the architecture and skylines of New York. Other current practitioners whom we’ve published in the last few years include ONCE from Barcelona, Stohead from southern Germany, Moscovite graffiti artist/muralist Konstantin Danilov, aka ZMOGK and the Eindhoven, Netherlands-based Erosie.

Here in Ragusa (Sicily) Greg Jager has selected a wall in the industrial ruins of the A. Ancione factory to reinterpret the shapes, colors, and juxtaposition of forms. Part of the Bitune public art festival that has crossed the city that with new public works in the last five years, Jager says that his new mural is his attempt at creating a “dialogue between architecture and anthropology” as this former asphalt industry is claimed by a developing artistic hub.

He calls his new work “Dismantle”.

“It’s not simply a name that I’ve chosen to underline the charm of decadence,” Jager says, “it represents for me an ethical approach to art: the idea of dismantling, deconstructing, stripping is present in all my practice and it’s with this spirit that I related to the majestic industrial archaeological site.”

As you look at these hulking forms and heavy materials, it is perhaps difficult to imagine how such technologies with presence, power, and footprint can be considered obsolete, no longer germane to modern industrial processes. Here we see construction waste, broken glass, bricks, iron pallets – all part of the residue of the past that we’ve built upon. Once considers as well that the processes of the past have an impact on our present: environmental, economic and political.

“In my artistic research there are traces of anthropization,” says the artist. “Urban landscapes, large architectural structures, bridges, quarries, – all represent alterations of the natural balance that have led man to face enormous catastrophes.”