react/review: a responsive journal for art & architecture

Alida Jekabson’s “Skating the Surrounds: Chemi Rosado-Seijo and El Bowl in La Perla, Puerto Rico” deals with the tension between the local and the global. She engages with Miwon Kwon’s book One Place after Another, which argues that starting in the 1990s, some artists “are attempting to reinvent site specificity as a nomadic practice.” El Bowl demonstrates how a site-specific artwork can become valorized globally, perhaps in part for its very specificity.

I'd like to take up the particular manifestation of tension between local and global exemplified by pilgrimage. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s (SOM) Hajj Terminal in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia (1975-81) and Gottfried Böhm's pilgrimage church Mary of Victory in Wigratzbad, Germany (1972-6) could be seen to engage some of the dynamics that Kwon calls “nomadic.” I will suggest, though, that pilgrimage is a more appropriate lens through which to view such structures, because it engages with the actual uses to which these spaces were put, rather than employing a fraught metaphor.