On the Greek island of Tinos, centuries-old dovecotes — white stone towers originally used to harvest pigeon droppings as fertilizer — are now upscale Airbnb rentals, complete with private yoga studios and infinity pools. Artist Sophie Friedman-Pappas sees these structures as symbols of how waste (literal, cultural, and existential) has long been used to determine value and social order. “You can probably just Google ‘pigeon shit Airbnb,’” she jokes — underscoring a practice attuned to the absurdities and insidiousness of commodified residue and ruin. The artist’s subject is waste itself: its viscous capacity to absorb ideology, and subsequently, mutate through financialization. Her wider project is meandering by necessity — part historical fiction, part pseudo-science, part psychogeography. Through this lens, she considers how narrative and form interact with physical matter and the built environment to delineate the perimeters of how we live: “the conditions that shape,” as she says.
In her expanded cinema work Deltille-d Wall’s Necessary Anachronism 2 (2023), based on the Airbnb dovecoats, the artist engages with grime and muck as a foundation of meaning in the form of an inverted camera obscura. Handmade with cardboard, hastily applied tape, and a scrolling strip of sewn Bloomingdale’s bags the color of orange caution tape — perhaps a warning of our fate as human waste — the ad hoc projector illuminates a hazy string of text from a short story written by Friedman-Pappas. It’s a fever dream, erotic stream-of-consciousness-meets-banal-travelogue, in which a house fire incinerates a vacationing couple in the midst of a failed erotic tryst. As the flames consume the architecture, their bodies splatter across the floor and walls, rendering the tourists literal scum: as in excrement, as in burned substance, as in moral judgment.
Presented at lieu gallery in Los Angeles and a second time at MIT List Center, the sculpture speaks to recurring themes and strategies throughout her practice. Originally property of the Grecian upper class beginning in the thirteenth century, the pigeon-poop houses epitomize how economic class and empires are literally fueled by garbage. Friedman-Pappas examines this cycle with specificity: tourist destinations selling authenticity with a view, or bursting capped landfills beneath the greenwashing facade of Freshkills Park, the container for debris from 9/11. The Twin Towers, too, were built on a landfill. Growing up in Manhattan’s Financial District, the artist is familiar with excessive accumulation, where toxic wealth disguises itself beneath the wreckage of constant construction and deconstruction. “I’m in the waste management business,” claims Tony Soprano. “Everybody immediately assumes you’re mobbed up. It’s a stereotype, and it’s offensive.”
Questioning the expectation of the artist as “truth seeker” (as opposed to the architect and urban planner as “truth creator”), Friedman-Pappas doesn’t ask whether truth exists but whether it matters. Or rather, how does it exist? Embracing contradiction in an understated, unassuming critical strategy, she cosplays as an unreliable narrator of what she frames as historical-fiction-forensics. Her narrative and research-based practice cites Hungarian Marxist philosopher György Lukács’s idea of necessary anachronism, 1 wherein a character holds an impossible omnipresent view of past and present simultaneously –– not unlike how “official” history is selectively written. Assuming this role, her work often mimics dubious artifacts dubbed museological souvenirs resulting from mythologized disasters: a warped brick allegedly dated to San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake fires, or adhesive supposedly made from exploded limbs of a mythologized horse suspected of dragging an anarchist’s bomb down Wall Street in 1920. For her upcoming exhibition at MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, a series of new drawings based on Buda’s Horse furthers the artist’s interest in the stuff of history’s ambiguity.
In works that abstract how the dregs and guts of capital are reabsorbed into the systems that produce them, Friedman-Pappas suggests that the corresponding ideologies and “truth” are more grotesque than the filthy matter left behind. She revisits historical sites and events where debris (like horse hooves turned into glue) is discarded as “nothing” until reprocessed for financial gain: a sinister fairytale where straw (or methane gas) must be spun into gold. A City full of Sticks (2020) — shown at Alyssa Davis Gallery in her first New York solo exhibition — is an assemblage in brick and wood resembling a shell of a building, literally protruding with straw. The object, marked by a single green sequin, rests on rusted “gold” soil taken from Freshkills, where authorities falsely claimed that the substance’s brilliant color indicated land health.
Seductive yet abject substances recur throughout her work in glassy, greenish white glazes where ash is fired until congealed. Her crumbling and scorched kiln sculptures — such as Kiln Building 4 (2024) or Kiln Building 5 (2025), shown recently at Paul Soto in New York — resemble brick ovens, mausoleums, and bomb shelters: architecture that could have been tourist sites and inevitably will be. Her drawings, sculptures, and writings emphasize deeply researched footnotes (as opposed to violent spectacle) that open onto materials and infrastructure that both announce and devour their own meaning. Her mode of abstraction and symbolism is a hyperdense amalgam of molten or high-refractory elements, released from a fixed position through association. “Destroying a matter’s identity doesn’t destroy it,” Friedman-Pappas has noted. But the “it” here is ambivalent. Is it matter itself that can’t be destroyed, or its narrative valence?
Even as the kilns are functional, Friedman-Pappas shifts away from waste as waste product, enacting a reversal of alchemy. In her hands, industrial and base materials transform not into precious metal, but into an intervention in the governing logic that casts refuse into dollars. The charred containers for melting remnants under fire at extreme heats become emblems of the artist’s overarching rejection of inherent identities attached to materials and reification of physical matter under capitalism. By imaging a building as kiln as a closed system, a built enclosure capable of hastening states of decomposition, her work echoes Robert Smithson’s sense that everything must return to dust in accordance with the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But her work more closely invokes the First Law: energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only altered in form, echoing the artist’s conviction that there’s no breaking the system, only reformulating.
Importantly, the kilns are never shown in action. Instead, their hollow, machine-like structures echo George Bataille’s concept of dépense (translating from French to expenditure), which advocated for “unproductive” acts as a means of protesting the drive toward surplus, and transcending the realities of being human. In sculptures based on ornament and aesthetics of preservation (as in ‘WHA —’ Gasped awake but spit the words back out they [were bitter], 2022), the artist envisions, in her words, a “mechanical failure and internal destruction of production apparatuses, aiming to still not only kilns but all vessels of production.” If it all screeches to a halt, malfunctioning rather than being destroyed, perhaps capitalist-determined meaning can self-implode (ideally with no end goal in sight, and without violent spectacle).
“A concept is a brick,” philosopher Brian Massumi writes in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980). “It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.” 2 Starting with a precise entry point, each of Friedman-Pappas’s works acts like one brick of a larger edifice, analogous to constructing a novel, or another kind of formal composition. In this way, she questions the creation of yet another instance of deconstruction. Skeptical of modernist reason and white-male poststructuralist theory alike, her work seeks to build and shape without pursuing fragmentation as a new instance of final solution. The result is a melancholic, comedically morbid recognition of aesthetic form tied to narrative and social realities, a dynamic that implicates the kind of humanity and society we are, based on what is excluded or included, deemed “nothing” or expendable.
Taken as a whole, her practice asks whether aura and truth are null and void, or just shifting forms of histories moving at various strains and probabilities, ricocheting like a flow of energy currents produced by specific metrics and by chance of what happened (or could). Referencing Robin Evans’s architectural theories, particularly those in The Projective Cast (2000), Friedman-Pappas’s drawings underscore projection as a means of speculation, rather than record as documentation under the auspices of fact. The approach to narrative as projection feels especially crucial in cities, where architects like Rudolph Schindler and urban planners like Robert Moses adopt form allegedly to follow function, but, so often, that function is ideological. As David Harvey writes, in his insinuation of the city as an unstable (and thus malleable) entity:
The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kinds of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish3.
As such, Friedman-Pappas’s researched approach and austere objects are laced with affect — a kind of mourning and ennui present in drawings like Into the Wind (2020). The work depicts a man urinating into an already filled underground sewer tunnel in an attempt to collapse the scaffolding above him, reflecting the futility of subversion,as if to say, we’re all just pissing in the same well, over and over. In these ways, the artist’s work confronts our repressed fears, asking whether the capitalist impulse to repurpose discarded matter stems from a fear of death — or of life? How are we supposed to metabolize this world?
Friedman-Pappas is fascinated with the meltdown that remakes something into something else that only reinforces it. That something is most often another form of property, another enclosure of existence that claims to occupy space in service of immortality — wrapped up in modernist architecture’s monomaniacal utopias and the tourist industry’s sanitized products of authenticity that are devoid of life’s actual physical degradation: “Check that there’s no hair, dust, or mold on surfaces and floors, and make the bed(s) with fresh linens,” Airbnb instructs would-be realtors. Like the characters in Tinos, maybe we’ve become the grotesque, complicit in the psychically self-destructive scum that begets scum. And maybe a meltdown is what’s needed — not at the destructive expense of human life, but to understand that base materials can’t be separated from our humanness and the worlds we create. Everything can mutate. All states are temporary and atemporal. Friedman-Pappas’s work suggests that it’s necessary to confront residue — physical, historical, emotional — instead of burying it. If we face the pent-up muck, which means facing ourselves, maybe some form of potential energy can be regurgitated from what we digest.
