fathoming the property line: Purvciems | 2026 | exhibited at:

– 2026 WORKS+WORDS Biennale, Aarhus, Denmark

– Galerija Smilga, Riga, Latvia

– Les Belles, Paris, France

collaboration with architect Jānis Aufmanis

I was supported by a grant from Flanders to conduct this research

An aerial view of Purvciems, a neighbourhood in Riga, Latvia, reveals an ordered network of green courtyards framed by grey concrete blocks—a former Soviet workers’ “utopia.” Yet, beneath this order lies an intangible chaos. Today, these rigid geometries are fragmented by invisible property lines whose traces appear in uneven grass edges and broken pavements. Their bureaucratic complexity hinders development.

These elusive boundaries embody a tension between physical space and the institutional systems that define it. Both abstract and material, a property line remains difficult to study. Beyond political critique lies a universal, deeper question:

what is a property line, and how does it exist in the real world?

The elusive, immaterial-yet-material quality of these virtual lines we recognize and respect in reality, situates the property line in a space between the physical and the virtual. This undefinable presence of a property line is impossible to fully understand or access if we are forced to try to describe it logically.

This work experimentally employs various contemporary tools for spatial representation to explore these property divisions that cut through Purvciems. The work focuses on producing tangible, observable “things” derived from the intangible nature of property lines, rather than descriptions of what a property line is.

Though open-ended, the work employs consistent methods such as translation. These methods reveal aspects of property divisions that would otherwise remain invisible.

As issues surrounding property remain as pertinent and critical today as ever, it is essential that we continually question and re-examine the fundamental nature of the very thing we are discussing. This work investigates the often-overlooked nature of what a property division actually is.

CNCed facade in XPS foam
This 1:1 scale artifact is an interpolation between:

readings of Purvciems’ virtual condition
– The property line is an unfathomable ideal with no detail or quality. It is exactly the same no matter which segment one observes, and is unaltered by what it cuts through

readings of Purvciems’ physical condition
– A photogrammetry scan of a building facade made of concrete panels intersected by a property line

To explore the in-between condition of these readings – a world where the two coexist and interact – the relationship between them has been translated into the relationship between XPS foam panels and a carefully designed CNC routing process. As the CNC router gets closer to the location of the property line (just to the right of the panel), the CNC progressively routs less of the 3D scanned information into the material, ultimately revealing more qualities of the XPS panel itself than the scanned context.

Screen print on paper

This 1:1 scale artifact is an interpolation between

readings of Purvciems’ virtual condition
Two overlapping ownership systems attempt to mitigate Purvciems’ complex parcel divisions:
– The ownership of land parcels
– The ownership of apartment blocks crossing many land parcels

readings of Purvciems’ physical condition
– A photogrammetry scan of a building facade
– A photogrammetry scan of the interior of the apartment behind the facade

The tension between the interior ownership of buildings on top of the land parcel system is flattened and translated into the tension between two overlapping lines of coloured ink. The scans are each separated into their CMYK image colour layers, and printed only considering the Y (yellow) and K (black) layers. The exterior YK is printed in a thick C (cyan) ink, and the interior YK is printed on top of it in a thin M (magenta) ink. The C and M colours fight to occupy a joint YK channel.

digital point cloud

This digital model is part of a line of inquiry that has been continually explored in this project since its inception. A property line has no physical scale; it is a 2-dimensional boundary that is infinitely thin. This line therefore has the same thickness at all physical scales. This video is part of an endless search to find the property line in physical reality.

The digital point cloud is made by layering a 3D photogrammetry scan of a snow-covered brick wall ruin, intersected by a property line, with itself at multiple scales. Each of the layers – all exactly the same scan but at a different scale – gradually shift in scale. Each scan layer is translated into a dispersed point cloud that materializes in proximity to the line.