If the walls of Westminster Hall could speak, what stories would they tell? The oldest remaining part of the Palace of Westminster, the Hall was erected in 1097, following the Norman invasion of 1066, at which time it was the largest hall in Europe.
Used primarily for the highest judicial courts in the country, its walls have seen some of the most important trials in England including those of King Charles I, William Wallace, Thomas Moore, Guy Fawkes and Warren Hastings.
Here too, on rare occasions, foreign leaders and dignitaries have spoken to both Houses of Parliament – Charles de Gaulle in 1960, Nelson Mandela in 1996, Pope Benedict XVI in 2010, Barack Obama in 2011 and Aung San Suu Kyi in 2012 – the first non-head of state to be given the honour of addressing MPs and peers in Westminster Hall.
Under the historic timber hammer-beam roof, hang two huge sheets of latex, embedded with the lines of stone joints and with dirt and dust, moulded directly from the adjacent wall as part of the cleaning and conservation process.
At the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, the Spanish architect, artist, preservationist, theorist and educator Jorge Otero-Pailos (born 1971) introduced the world to his project “The Ethics of Dust” an ongoing series of artworks derived from the cleaning of monuments, which at that time focussed on the Doge’s Palace in Venice and since then has continued with Trajan’s Column in Rome and the Maison de Famille Louis Vuitton in Paris (both 2015).
His latest of the series is installed over the summer in Westminster Wall. Over 50 metres long, the cast of the Hall’s east wall contains years and years of dirt and dust trapped and in the translucent latex.
Hung parallel to the east wall of which it is a record, the sheets are the results of a stone-cleaning process in which the latext was sprayed onto the walls and then peeled off carefully to carefully remove dirt and grime from the surface without damaging the stonework. Like amber, which often contains insects and other items from when it was created, the latex sheets glow with what John Ruskin called “that golden stain of time”.
Produced and curated by Artangel, this is an adventourous contemporary artwork to show in the historic and architecturally constrained setting of Westminster Hall. How will the Government ensure that such international collaborations can continue in the new world post-Brexit?
