PLANETARY HOME IMPROVEMENT:
From Just-in-Time to Geological Time
VI PER Gallery, Prague | December 17, 2021 — February 2, 2022
Co-designers: Christine Giorgio, Amelyn Ng, Gabriel Vergara | Sound Design: Nathan Davis
Student assistants: Remi Qiu, Ellie Cody, Sarah Chriss, Carrie Li
Link to Gallery | Link to Website
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The home improvement store is a geological site on demand. Rockwool, Sheetrock, Quikrete. Materials are processed into products, packaged, stacked, and sold across global DIY supply-chains, from Home Depot to Bauhaus and OBI. Basalt, gypsum, limestone. Material economies are severed from mineral entanglements with millennia of rock, fossil, plant, and stone. It takes 1 day to install drywall; it takes 299 million years to form gypsum.
Winner of VI PER Gallery’s 2021 international open call, Planetary Home Improvement is a design and research project that takes stock of the terrestrial home via the big-box DIY home improvement store to examine the geological life of product accumulation, installation, and instruction through both physical and digital gallery artifacts.
As the home improvement industry continues to propagate rocks in anthropo-convenient forms, the exhibition asks: What planetary urgencies, temporalities and extractions undergird products of just-in-time geology?