Burden
Video (excerpt), mute, dimensions variable, 16/9, full film 08:10, 2023
Shot during the lockdown of 2020 in an urban space emptied of occupants, these still scenes were realized in the limited perimeter between my home and my studio in the Lichtenberg district. They reveal the different strata of East Berlin’s modern architectural history, from the utopian Garden Cities through the Communist period (Stasi headquarters, Plattenbau) to the gigantic storage sheds. In this performative video, I try to represent the burden and mental load that I have to carry. As the film progresses, fatigue builds to the point of physical and mental exhaustion.
Things get heavy
work in situ, 2018
video stop motion, no sound, 2 ́33 ́ ́, self-made plan, laser print A0
Invited to exhibit in a private flat, I decided to weight every element of it in order to calculate the total mass. I brought my own scale and weighted me with each object, and if I couldn’t lift an object I estimated. During the vernissage that happened in the flat, I weighed each visitor to calculate the average of the heaviest moment. The peak happened with 44 people, for a total mass of 6534,4 kg.
This work questions the potential physical and psychological influence generated by the built environment on our bodies and minds.
Body load
in situ installation, self-adhesive film, 1.86 x 1.80 m each window pane, 2021
As the popularity of large post-war housing complexes is declining, “intermediate” housing (medium-sized buildings) are making a comeback. A selection of images of this type of architecture is presented in the windows of the gallery, recalling the aesthetics of real estate ads: no human presence, no specific regional identity, and aiming for a certain neutrality. These images are actually extracted from press articles collected from the web. They are here accompanied by their caption texts, readable from inside the gallery.