Dora Budor | Continent

Trained as an architect, the Croatian-born artist Dora Budor regards buildings and institutions as tectonic, infrastructural, and gendered systems. Against the aesthetic pursuit of making buildings, she commits to a politics of selectively taking them apart. In "Continent", Budor introduces a crisis to  Peter Zumthor's building, probing its physical intactness through a series of interventions that foreground concealed operations, force external structures inwards, and make them invisible resonant. 

One meter from Kunsthaus Bregenz's northeastern facade, a manhole leads to an underground collector duct that encircles the foundations of the entire building. Its so-called diaphragm walls extend vertically into the soil, mirroring the height of the above-ground structure. Their function is to prevent the collapse surrounding buildings and control the seepage of groundwater from the nearby Pfänder mountain and Lake Constance.