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Architecture is architecture from the both the inside and the outside. What does it mean to enter a building and then to build it again on paper? This important work by Charles LaBelle explores the meaningless, but essential, structures of daily life and grapples with the power of nations. It is as much a journal as it is scratches on the wall of life's divine jail cell. -Gregorio de Mattos e Guerra, Ood Press

For Hong Kong based artist Charles LaBelle, life has a few rules of engagement. The most striking is his resolution to document every building that he physically enters -- only once at the moment before first stepping in. This ongoing practice, begun in 1997 and entitled Buildings Entered, has produced an archive that contains over 12,000 individual buildings that LaBelle maintains in an electronic database. Each record consists of the time he entered the building as well as its location (street, city, state and country). In an uncanny strategy, the photographs themselves are never exhibited; instead, LaBelle produces drawings of specific buildings or groups of buildings, often... More > “revisiting” these sites years later.

The drawings thus function as “traces of memory,” incidental by-products secondary to the experience that occurs during the artist’s singular encounter with the architectural space. This event literally “takes place” as the artist crosses an unknown threshold --- as space and body intersect. For LaBelle, this instant is akin to an erotic interpenetration, transforming both the world and the artist in a mutual engorgement. Since every building holds the potential for seduction and carnal embrace, LaBelle always carries a camera and sometimes enters specific buildings simply because he likes their history or the way they look.

Recognizing that his personal experience may not be truly communicable, LaBelle nevertheless continues to make and exhibit his drawings. The decision to foreground these hand-made documents rather than the mechanically reproduced photographs stems from his aversion for the commodification of the image. While both drawing and photography offer a reproduction of an unrepeatable empirical experience, LaBelle believes that the manual labor involved in making each drawing bring it closer to articulating his bodily interaction with space and the haptic ground of experience itself. The drawing is the only public remnant of a private event, itself a small part in the unfurling narrative of LaBelle’s life.

excerpted from the 2011 Singapore Biennale catalog text by Nuit Banai < Less