A truly interesting read about removing and preserving the dust from the walls of the Palace of Westminster.  What does this dust tell us about the history of the Palace and of London itself?

Read the full article at The Guardian

The Ethics of Dust: a latex requiem for a dying Westminster

“Jorge Otero-Pailos applied latex to walls in Westminster Hall to lift out centuries of dirt.

Two translucent latex sheets hang parallel to the east wall of Westminster Hall in the Palace of Westminster. They run the length of the thousand-year-old space, and reach from the top of the stone walls, beneath the medieval hammer-beam roof, right down to the floor. Walking between the wall and the hanging latex, one might think of an inner cloister, the sun filtered as if through alabaster, a honeyed light that’s always afternoon and autumn. But not now.

Given the material and its slight but noticeable odour, you might think it’s rubber-fetish day at Westminster (and it probably is, for some member or other). Cloth squares and rectangles are embedded in the yellowish, off-white latex, giving it a patched, uneven look. There are occasional smears of dirt, dark dribbles that look like old, coagulated blood, and lighter patches reminiscent of surgical dressings. Suppuration comes to mind. Wounds. Healing. Evidence. I cannot look at Jorge Otero-Pailos’s The Ethics of Dust without the associations tumbling in, seeing what isn’t there. Or rather seeing what is there, in the captured tide-lines and whorls of commonplace muck, but seeing something more, like the images one sees in the fire or an accidental smudge of paint, finding a pattern where none exists.

On the face of it the project is nothing more than the residue from stone restoration. Liquid latex was applied to the east wall of the thousand-year old hall, reinforced with fabric, then peeled off in two great, continuous lengths. As the material dried, the dirt in the wall migrated into the latex, leaving the wall itself rejuvenated, its surface returned to the original pale colour it had when medieval masons first dressed the stone. Cleaning stone is delicate work, but an almost everyday achievement for expert conservators today. The ethics of modern restoration and cleaning insist that the material itself isn’t harmed or discoloured or abraded by the restoration itself.

But what is in the collected dust and smears of dirt? Given the age and history of the building, and the thousands upon thousands who have walked through here, appeared on trial (including Guy Fawkes and Charles I), and lain in state (all those monarchs, and Winston Churchill), one asks if the dead shed skin, if anger and anxiety somehow permeate first the air and then the stone. The fires lit and torches burned, the miasma of excrement from the Great Stink of 1858 – when sewage lay piled in the summer drought up to six feet deep on the Thames foreshore – the smog of December 1952, the thickening air of the blitz, and who knows how much tobacco have all left traces.

Madrid-born Otero-Pailos is director of historic preservation at New York’s Columbia University. His The Ethics of Dust takes its title from an essay by John Ruskin, much of which concerned Venice and the Doge’s Palace, as well as Westminster Hall. Ruskin differentiated between restoration and conservation – the difference between destruction and preservation. Otero-Pailos’s Artangel project follows on from his own work cleaning the walls of the Doge’s Palace, the Palazzo Ducale in Venice. This might be taken as a companion piece, and as something that looks like art but maybe isn’t. If it is more than a demonstration of the conservator’s art and science (and one that took endless negotiation with the authorities at Westminster, before various ceremonial dignitaries, including Black Rod, could finally give it the nod), its resonance now has been hijacked by the ongoing disaster in British life.

In the five years since it was first conceived and executed, the sheets have themselves been kept in special conditions, to conserve them.”

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