I was intrigued with the discussion at Fallow, Germaine Koh's installation, after our tour of the Digital Studio at ECIAD, (wish we had some of thei gear at MDM), as it relates to the current interest in redefining what constitutes artspaces, galleries, museums and collections. The history of these institutions has always had implications around access—public/private space, class—leisure /wealth, audience—viewer/gaze. Check out JohnBerger on Ways of Seeing, cultural hierarchies—see Sally Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Spaces, and overall the architecturally reinforced whiff of elitism and sanctimony that has often surrounded them.Fallow certainly takes on some of these dichotomies in a down to earth way by making us question the nature of collections and galleries by honouring what is usually overlooked abandoned public space, and by extension the people who must use them.The dimension I’d add to the mix, is time. These kinds of urbanspaces exist on a schedule determined by demographic pressures and opportunities for development and profit. They are our local micro level expressions of the same forces that destroy tropical forests and wipe out wetlands all over the world. Even our definitions of “green space” exclude these problematic places, where ownership and responsibility for is unclear, indeed often deliberately obscured.

Fallow takes a small piece of land and presents it both within a traditionally privileged gallery space and within a very specific timeframe. Marked by an opening and a closing date, the exhibit, takes our experience of it into a ritual space where its value is not determined by a capitalist context as only as a place holder until it can be monetized and replaced by something more
”productive".