Making of Trax / Modern Art, forgotten past.
Turning a 30 year abandoned house into a tropical space for music and dance.
Between 2019 and 2020, Trax was built out of an abandoned house by the railway tracks.
The tracks themselves are a symbol of our colonial past that could have been so easily repaired, had the government of Sri Lanka considered The People of this beautiful island.
As a young country boy working on road construction in Jamaica Lee 'Scratch' Perry understood first that 'sound comes from the rock'. Scratch would pioneer the sounds of dub and reggae, assisting Bob to reach super-stardom and shooting out new branches on the tree of life and music.
The delayed radio frequencies of dub would birth new genres representing black, gay, female and free communities around the world. From Chicago and NY would grow hip hop and house, and from the UK would grow punk, jungle and drum & bass.
Like the roots of music, the roots of architecture too exists at the juxtaposition of humanity's straight lines and the raw untamed organic forms of nature.
Frank Lloyd Wright understood this first with his iconic "falling water" (1935), then Sri Lanka's unsung heroine Minnette De Silva (1948) who paved the way for Sri Lanka's own style, Tropical Modernism. Geoffery Bawa, Ulrik Plesner, Ena De Silva and Barbara Sansoni (1958) would take this groundbreaking style of construction to the world and the wise and humble landscapist Laki Senanayake, would break it down to its essence; 'the way of nature' by drawing the direction of wind on water on his architectural plans.
While master architects around the world moved towards AI and technology to manifest humongous structural permutations and pilaged the earth to achieve them, Laki brought architecture full circle, surrendering the core of human design to the simple way of nature.
Deconstructing the shell of a building or updating a train track ultimately uses far less material and gives value to something that capitalism fails to acknowledge, Time.
Deconstructive architecture encapsulates wabi-sabi; transience and imperfection as a key part of the design process. Can their be perfection in understanding imperfection?
In the Japanese art of kitsungi, cracks in workmanship are filled with gold— a metaphor for finding beauty in imperfection.
The empty space between the train tracks and Trax would grow into a home garden over the 2 year pandemic.
Seasons change, mad things rearrange.
Adding the first layers of interior garden
The garden at trax introduces the world to deconstructive landscaping: a system of introducing new plants while preserving existing growth structures. This method attempts to encompass the importance of generating oxygen, transpiration, cloud condensation nuclei and carbon capture into the design process.
The existing forest of glyricidia trees, bananas and wild sunflowers generate nitrogen (N), phosphorous (P) and potassium (K) keeping the sandy soil by the sea fertile.
“Nothing in man’s experience enables him to resist the disintegrating effect of money and machines. An enemy to his nature, likely to emasculate or destroy him, is embraced by him.” — Frank Lloyd Wright
The garden once* led into a small and patch of untouched forest a stones-throw from the sea filled with pink and green shelled snails and rare tropical herbs. Curry leaves, wild citrus (yaki narang), humongous elephant ears (taro) and carnivorous elephant foot yams (arums) grow natively in this seaside forest. The 40 year overgrown ruins in the forest wer testament to how quickly nature would take over if humanity ceased to exist.
*this tiny patch of forest has since been destroyed in the name of capitalist greed.
New plants in the trax garden include birds-nests ferns, dendro calamus hookaris bamboo, red and pink shoe-flowers, various tropical palms, blue lotuses and a red flame flamboyant tree. The plants reflect on our ability to work in tandem with nature to manifest a reality that could live beyond our own mortal existence.
Amidst these flowering plants and trees also grow papaya, eggplant, capsicum, chili, moringa, holy basil (thulsi), blue clitoria ternatea, lemongrass and rampe used to brew apothecary concoctions at the bar.
Rare things grow in strange places.
In Medieval Sinhalese Art, Sri Lankan scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy discusses how colonial systems took away art from the weaver, the sculptor, the landscapist and the farmer, replacing the ancient spirit with machine like human productivity that increased output at the expense of unmeasurable creativity.
I carry this faded ticket to Huangguoshu waterfall in China as a constant reminder that wherever on EARTH I go, nature remains the true source of power and ancient wisdom.
12 years since the spirit of good music movement was first imbued into a cat, the idea continues to live in the cracks of the space time continuum.
Guided by the power of music in a world of shifting climates, capitalist greed and infinite access to knowledge, I long for humanity to remember the ancient way again.