Pod Tower Historical Society

Pod Tower Living: Indian Hill, Pawlet, Vermont 1
30”x30”; artist-designed and printed wallpaper hand-cut collage on photomontage of artist photographs printed on 230gsm 9.5-mil matte fine-art paper; 2020

About the Project

The year is 2062. Climate change, political and social division, income inequality, and a series of pandemics fundamentally altered how humanity organizes itself. In this time, the focus is less on the accumulation of wealth and more on a sustainable future. The nuclear family, commuting, and suburban living are things of the past. People live in interconnected, vertical communities. People work less and they work remotely. These communities are multi-generational. They school and raise their children together. They care for their elders as a collective. Rather than living in houses spread out across the land, groups of people live in Pod Towers where the ecological footprint is concentrated. Ric Kasini Kadour draws out this scenario through a series of fictional oral histories and archive materials in which people from the future recount their past. The histories are accompanied by a series of collage works that illustrate the idea of “Pod Tower Living”.

Kadour uses art to tell stories that are often speculative in nature, operating from the viewpoint of the future, and involved in world building, mythologizing, and history making. In the project, “Pod Tower Historical Society”, Kadour recasts himself as the archivist and historian of a communal living space in the future. The collages use artist designed and printed wallpaper and original photographs, photomontages, or found photographs printed on fine paper. Fictional archive materials are made by adapting materials from community-specific Special Collections. In doing this, Kadour threads history into a story from the future that looks back and comments on the present.

Collage

  • Pod Tower Living: Indian Hill, Pawlet, Vermont 1
  • Pod Tower Living: Indian Hill, Pawlet, Vermont 2
Each: 30”x30”; artist-designed and printed wallpaper hand-cut collage on photomontage of artist photographs printed on 230gsm 9.5-mil matte fine-art paper; 2020
  • Pod Tower Living: Red Desert, Wyoming 1
  • Pod Tower Living: Red Desert, Wyoming 2
  • Pod Tower Living: Red Desert, Wyoming 3
Each: 15”x22”; Diptych: artist-designed and printed wallpaper handcut collage on found Carol Highsmith photo printed on 140lb Canson cold press watercolor paper; 2020 (Carol Highsmith image: Gates Frontiers Fund Wyoming Collection within the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)
  • Desert City 1
  • Desert City 2
  • Desert City 3
Each: 8″x8″; collage print; 2020

Installation
Pod Tower Historical Society

The body of work manifests as an installation of the Pod Tower Historical Society where the viewer is encouraged to sort through the fictional archives. A growing collection of folders contains collaged architectural plans, newspaper clippings, photographs of people who lived in the pods, transcriptions of oral histories, and pages about people who lived in the pods. A finding aid details how the work was appropriated. Material can be purposed as zines and pamphlets. Other artists can be invited to contribute work to the archive.

Selections from the Pod Tower Historical Society
Selections from the Pod Tower Historical Society

Exhibition

Pod Tower Living: Indian Hill, Pawlet, Vermont 1
was included in
“Vermont Utopias: Imagining the Future”
at Bennington Museum in Bennington, Vermont
November 27th-December 28th, 2020
Curator: Jamie Franklin
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