Visiting Open Sheds:
Preliminary Thoughts

Open Sheds Used for What? The phrase is drawn from the journal of a mining inspector in an United States-owned mine in Peru, once confronted with open structures whose use he could not immediately determine. “Arsenic maybe in barrels”, he proposed. To the imaginative reader, the question, breaking the inspector’s usually methodical and assured style, brims with the promise of uncertainty. The ambivalence of the open sheds represented an importunate remainder signalling the limits of the standardisation of remote mining operations, of the inspector’s knowledge. And did it not reflect the appealing irreducibility of the shed as an architectural form, the primitive hut? We—me, my twin sister Marina, and later many collaborators—appropriated the stray sentence to name a project that would become a series of installations, performances, and interventions employing a found metal frame placed on various locations in Chicago: empty lots, backyards, a community garden, an abandoned industrial park; sites which sparked the same feeling of provocative possibility we read in the inspector’s notes.

What was the “Open Shed”? By being “open”, did it invite participation? Can a thing by itself “invite”, “propose”, “gesture”? Or did it sneak in into the open, invited or not? It started out from the pleasure and the performance of construction: the sudden emergence of a “thing”, a place, a relief cut out from a plane of possibilities. Once opened, it could be articulated, moulded, visited, abandoned, closed. Crafting this thing involved at every moment a practical knowledge of where we were, a testing of boundaries. It was situational and independent, concerned with the spatial and visual relations that appear from this very moment of emergence. It always held, on the one hand, a relationship with the human body as frame and shelter, and on the other, the occasional gaze of the passer-by. A little curiosity in the city. The shed was curious about its surroundings, and remaining in place for weeks at a time, most of the time on its own, it certainly had encounters that we cannot know.
We can attach to the shed the vocabulary of the parasite, as described by Michel Serres: that which takes and doesn’t give, but also that which gives without taking, and perhaps most often that which shares what isn’t its own, not unlike the fabled city mouse who, feasting on the tax-farmer’s rug, invites the country mouse to join.1 Sometimes, it knocked on the door and was invited to join the host at the table; or it was invited to stop by on its journey; at other times, it took advantage of the moment when its unwitting hosts had turned their backs. Occasionally, it overstayed its welcome. But it also played host; its purpose was always to invite others to come, to add, and to make changes.
Where did its nourishment and the parasitic friction come from? This was a world of absentee property owners, gardener-stewards, private security, construction workers, curious and cautious neighbours, the police, contributing artists, homeowners, friends with cars—just to mention its human providers. When custody and care are unclear, who is the host and who is the parasite?

        A sign with a phone number?
        A liability?
        A heartfelt memory?
        The papers, always beyond sight?
        A practice of inhabitation?
        An assigned duty?

Instead of attempting a theory of Open Sheds according to The Parasite, I offer a few encounters that trouble the question of giving and taking.

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1. The empty lot near Morgan Street and 34th Place

It was a beautiful empty lot, overgrown with grasses, wild flowers, vines, and strawberries. The shed was placed between two buildings, a new three-flat under construction and a two-flat with a backyard. For weeks, we left the structure untouched, discreetly inhabiting the space. Quickly, it became a meeting place and a stage, which we used to rehearse movement sequences that reenacted its proportions. In that sense, it was a medium for the body. Not until our last month in the lot, as we started making changes to the structure, becoming hosts to others who came to make installations, did we attract the attention of humans who might be watching the space. One day, the neighbour popped his head over the backyard fence, through which a short and wide fruiting tree poked its branches. We made friends; it is good to be friends with one’s neighbours, when one’s over uninvited. The next time, we came by to find the structure trampled over. We put it back together, securing it with rubble from the construction next door. It wasn’t long before it was about to happen again. Workers from the site next door spoke on the phone with a concerned expression, making arrangements to take the structure away. Offering some flatbread we had just cooked by the shed, we made friends for the day and avoided eviction. In the following days, the shed became more visible as installations increasingly enclosed the structure. The more it looked like a shelter, the more interesting and threatening it appeared to our watchers. The next weekend we received a visit from the property owner, who had hired those men to remove the structure. Finding that the shed was no home but an art project (“Used for what?” Who is a threat, and who is a guest?), he had no issue with it. On the fourth of July, our last weekend, the mounting tensions surrounding the shed’s intermittent occupation came to a head. During a performance whose sounds blended with the fireworks all across the neighbourhood, we were approached by the police, who had been called by a neighbour. We were let go once we asserted the property owner’s acquiescence and assured them we would remove all traces of our stay. The following Monday, the lot was fenced in.

2. The three lots on Sangamon Street and Cullerton Street

The shed danced around the boundaries of its agreement: not so much the host’s hospitality, but their ability to invite. We speak, of course, of the invisible and permeable boundaries of property. The partial permission by a community garden—itself a space for hosting—emboldened us to invite others not only to intervene, but to watch, to “attend”. At times, the shed moved beyond the perimeter presided by the garden, extending to the other two vacant lots on the intersection with a self-confidence borrowed from the permitted occupation. But we were well within our bounds in the leftover land among the mulch, bark, and the stump of an old tree when we returned to find that the shed had received a visitor in our absence. The visitor had built a top cover with bark and straw. Was this an intrusion? Or a welcome gesture? Upon close inspection, it was clear that it had been a loving encounter. The pieces of bark were carefully layered to provide security without fastening, affectionately tied only at the frame’s eight vertices with ribbon-like straw. The centre was left open as if to draw the eyes to the blue autumn sky. Materials from around the shed reorganised into a lyrical, ephemeral cover.

3. The Franklin’s backyard by Franklin Boulevard and Central Park Avenue

Here, the shed was at home. It was invited, and was among friends. It spilled onto the garden and let its friends spill onto it too, as prop, stage, and frame. As autumn turned into winter and winter into spring, it became an excuse to visit and a meeting point. Since it could make itself so comfortable, it started to reminisce. We made a map and a book to tell its journey. One day, it turned itself inside out to assemble elements from its former and current host-places: wild grasses and flowers, bark and wood chips, borrowed pebbles, plastic roofing, and its own materials of cotton twine and canvas.

4. The Damen Silos

Following teenagers on a Sunday afternoon, we found the right spot and the right time to enter the hallowed land of the abandoned grain silos by Damen Avenue and the Sanitary and Ship Canal. We lifted it over to a clearing where it would be discrete enough to blend in, but distinct enough to be found. Sitting amongst everything that defines the city, the sensation is of the collapse of time and space. The canal, the old silos, the blooming spring prairie (full of invasive species), the singing birds, the skyline, the warehouses, the data centre, the road, the park. It was easy to belong there, but we were also watched; surveilled by private security at one end of a chain of authority that ends at the State of Illinois. We learned from other interlopers the best times and places to come visit. The shed remained there for months, as if among its own kin, and received many guests who took in the surroundings and rearranged the abundance of its material world.
We visited the shed every week. Many times we were brought into close encounters with the patrolling guards. It is possible that the increased frequency of our group visits led to a corresponding increase in security. Unlike the spaces we had previously occupied, this was a place more easily visited alone: often the shed was unable to offer itself as a host to people or to material interventions due to the threat of security and the fear of being visible. Conversely, visitations in larger groups appeared more threatening to the guards. It was the end of the summer when we dared to host a feast, fire and table staged within the shed’s accommodating frame. It was supposed to be a safe day. But our knowledge of that place was not enough; the host could also be unpredictable, and a guard came upon one of us. For a moment, we stood still. We looked at one another, no longer able to pretend to be anything else: neither of us could suspend disbelief. (Who was the host, who was the guest, and who was the parasite?). But this time, unexpectedly, we made friends, and invited the officer to join us: a move undoubtedly as risky for them as it was for us. It was beautiful, fraught, and brief; we collected ourselves before the changing of the guards.

Summer’s end – a postscript from Marina

Open sheds used for what? became a way to know, and to speak about, the Damen Silos. On the day we were going to share our experience from the summer with the audience of the Chicago Architecture Biennial, in the fall, we decided to do a last intervention as a gesture of our presence on the site.
In the morning, as we entered the site, we were nervous– the patrol car was there, and we did not sense that we could bargain today. Still, we scurried up to the old factory hall with a bunch of white fabrics and began to hang them on charred beams, on the branches of trees grown on the second floor, and on the roof, on the shards on the windows that once gave light to the people who worked on the ground floor. We were quick, but not enough. The fabrics had a moment to billow in the wind before we were seen. A guard waved from the ground that we must come down (from the roof, for the first time, we were visible from the street, from the guard post, even from across the canal). When we got back to the park, the patrol car expected us on the other side of the fence. They told us to wait: the police were coming.
The officer arrived shortly after. She explained the consequences of breaching into Illinois state property. She noted our car’s licence plate and advised us to disappear.
That afternoon, we did not enter the site with the visitors. It was too dangerous. Many more people came than we could have expected. We led them slowly from the other entrance to the park down the promenade, telling them about the Canal and about the properties of wild-grown plants on the site, pointing to the silos, where the octagonal frame was still standing, although we could not see it behind the tall grasses. We had overstepped and had to retreat. At least the shed survived unspoiled.

City mouse, country mouse

As Serres describes it, the parasitic relationship is always unidirectional, and thus enchained; yet, one may at once play the role of host and guest or parasite, as the shed always did with its sites and its collaborating artists. As organisers and conveners, our relationship with invited collaborators also wavered between the many registers of the artist-organised space: curator, collaborator, assistant, commissioner. This giving-and-taking was not without friction, and each occupation generated tension as well as enjoyment. Open sheds used for what? was always transitory and changeable. It sought out spaces where there was some “opening”, in space, in time, and social organisation. In the frame of the parasite, the shed was for the most part a discrete interventor, the irritation it may have produced was not a manifesto, although its attitude rejected private property. Its challenge was always to preserve the fleeting, precarious moment of opening.