Cole Palatini

Pedagogies of Site Fellowship | Field Notes

Fake rocks is a project developed within the 2025 Dia fellowship cohort: pedagogies of site. This project identifies materials which are common in the contemporary landscape and attempts to suppliant those materials into a geologic future. Cardboard, plastic, foil, are materials essential in the operation of many facets of daily contemporary life. Objects in Dia’s collection, when not on-view, are moved and exist encased in cardboards, plastics, and other disposable materials. These kinds of material skins are essential in the operation of institution spaces as well as daily life.

In many ways the material histories of Dia’s centers: Beacon and Chelsea mirror that of the broader built environment.  Evidence of the material history and industrial origins of Dia are manifest throughout each space and the infrastructure which connects the two. For the construction of the factory where Dia Beacon now operates, masses of earth were reconfigured from the Hudson Valley by largely immigrant communities. This earth, once formed and hardened in industrial baking stacks, was relocated to sites around the Hudson Valley and beyond, becoming the scaffolding for urban and rural environments across the landscape.

Fake rocks brings attention to materials in a constant state of production-use-discard. The site in question is a material site which seeks to reconsider temporary objects as permanent manifestations of matter. This work seeks to imagine what conditions are available when the material is considered permanent— allowed to accommodate through sedentation, friction, pressure, heat, etc.  Borrowing studio practices from the methods of materials production found deep in the earth, this work imagines a

Field Notes from the Fellows share provisional mappings, poetic fragments, visual fieldnotes, and digital captures generated by participants of the Pedagogies of Site Fellowship ahead of their culminating event on June 7, 2025 at Dia Chelsea. To learn more about the program and event, please visit the Dia website.