Site-specific installation for This House Will Destroy Anyone exhibition at abandoned wing of historic building

plants and insects, sand, polyester resin, dimensions variable 

Nestled within the fractured bones of a crumbling architectural shell, La Isla stages a miniature world—an island of stillness within collapse. This preserved microcosm is constructed from fine aquarium sand, brittle plant remnants, and the delicate corpses of flies, moths, wasps, and dragonflies. Each element is embedded in layers of polyester resin, a glassy surface that arrests decay while simultaneously entombing it.

Set against the slow ruin of the surrounding space—peeling walls, cracked plaster, exposed joists—the work functions as both maquette and mausoleum. The ruined building acts as an echo chamber for this fragile interior world, amplifying the tension between scale and meaning, between the vastness of architectural failure and the intimacy of a dying ecosystem caught in resin.

La Isla conjures a memory of a place that may never have existed. Suspended between preservation and disappearance, it speaks to utopias lost or imagined—sealed away, unreachable, mythic. The work becomes a still point in the wreckage, a world within a world, where nature is frozen mid-gesture, and time loops back on itself like a dream of sanctuary at the edge of ruin.

La Isla (2015)

MAGDALENA  DUKIEWICZ