April 20, 2026
Exhibition Opening
April 20, 2026 • 5:00 pm • Hayes Hall - Atrium
Presentation by Celia Chaussabel at 5:30 pm
Objectiles, or object-projectiles, are discarded building materials on an adventure across time and space to collect as many uses as possible. Rather than remaining associated with their original function, Objectiles are impressionable, physically transforming and carrying the traces of the uses they encounter. By holding onto these impressions and leaving them visible, Objectiles invite us to time travel with them—to imagine the lives that may have come before, and those that might still follow.
Exhibition Dates
April 20–July 26, 2026
9:00 a.m.–4:30 p.m.
Location
Hayes Hall, 1st Floor
UB South Campus
250 Hayes Rd
Buffalo, NY 14214
Curated by
Celia Chaussabel, 2025-26 Banham Fellow
In this installation, a number of Objectiles have made a pause along their journey and taken on the use of “floor." Within the paradigm of mass-produced, standardized, new building materials, floors are expected to be flat, neutral, and unobtrusive—background surfaces that support flexible, unspecified activity. But Objectiles are, by their very nature, not neutral. Their idiosyncratic physical characteristics are what telegraph their particular trajectory and make them Object-Projectiles in the first place. When these characteristics are designed into a floor, new affordances emerge. Slopes, hinges, ridges, moments of holding or lifting, challenge the idea of the floor as a passive plane and instigate new types of activities and engagement that are shaped by material difference.
Traversing this Objectiled floor requires negotiation and imagination, but in exchange, our encounters with Objectiles may enable time travel—revealing stories about past sites they used to inhabit, other people and entities they crossed paths with, and events they witnessed. And whatever memories we impart on Objectiles in their life as a floor—whatever traces of use we leave on them—they will happily collect and bring forward into their next life.
This installation, developed and led by 2025–26 Banham Fellow Celia Chaussabel, tests a method for designing, building, and telling stories with reused building materials. It is the continuation of a longer research project, started in 2021, that explores the role of narratives and aesthetic sensibilities in shifting us away from a linear material economy. Bringing together interests in material life cycles, narratology, and representation, the project asks how we might become more motivated to reuse materials through appreciation and affection for the stories that these objects carry with them.
Previous works explore representations of these narratives, including graphic novels, animations, and video games that trace the trajectories of objects and the processes, sites, and people entangled in their trajectories. This architecturally-scaled installation in Hayes Hall extends that work into the built environment, taking on new questions about accumulation: How are stories retained, layered, or transformed when many objects come together in a construction? Built at full-scale and asked to perform architectural work, this installation also asks how spaces shaped by reused objects might challenge the usual functions of architecture, and invite new uses and perspectives previously not imagined.