Art Gallery of Windsor, Canada, 2006
Mediamatic, Amsterdam, 2017

Derridraw is a critical response to Jacques Derrida’s failed collaboration with architect Peter Eisenman to design a garden for Parc de la Villettte. The collaboration was documented in a book entitled Chora L Works, which serves as a growth medium for the plants in Derridraw The project is inspired by the concept of chora, which Derrida defines roughly as space, following Plato’s Timaueus. For this project, the artist reinterprets chora as field, based on a close reading of Timaeus and also on the modern Greek word chorafi, which basically designates a farmer’s field. In the end, Derridraw is about the inability of philosophers and critical theorists to “ground themselves,” to embody their ideas in the physical world, which is the primary reason why Derrida’s collaboration with Eisenman failed.