This ongoing series of site-specific project uses the replication of existing functional elements in an architectural environment to push the boundary between art and architecture. It aims to destabilize our relationship to built surroundings by raising questions about our perception of the background environment in our everyday experience

Given our contemporary lack of attention to our physical environments, consumed instead by cell phones and screens as we are manipulated by the capitalist attention economy, this project intends to draw attention to the mundane elements in our physical environment and to this relationship that is continuously taking place as we move through the world.

The elements that I reproduce as doppelgӓngers are utilitarian elements that typically recede into the background of our experience of built environments. Their ubiquity and repetition of forms and their existence as necessary functional systems permits them to escape aesthetic questions. Doubling is a way to call attention to one such object, and creates a tension through the uncertainty about whether this doubled object is original or an addition.

Each doppelgӓnger is made out of the same materials as its original. Most of these elements are decades old and are unavailable as products for purchase, and so I have to build them by hand. Their idiosyncrasies from their use over time and engagement with surrounding elements, being worn or rusted, painted and repainted, are recreated.

This iteration was installed at 155 Rua Benformoso (4th floor), Lisbon, Portugal.