"And leave a day at every door" - Berlin-Lichtenberg, 2024
As if crumpled by the hand of a giant, an old, partly rusty piece of sheet metal lies on a white glazed wooden panel in the middle of the room. It acts as a kind of centre of the room installation, which is on the 5th floor of the studio building at Genslerstrasse 13 in Berlin.
I have my studio here since a few years now. On the way to the studio which I have since a few years now I find things which I take along on the spur of the moment. Pieces of branches left behind by the city gardeners or this large piece of sheet metal.
The studio house is part of a building complex that is now a listed building. During the existence of the GDR, the Ministry for State Security (MfS) had its offices and workshops here for around 20 years. Back then, it was called the Operative Technical Sector (OTS); surveillance devices such as bugs were manufactured here.
The room, like the installation itself, gives no indication that there is otherwise a studio. I have transformed it in such a way that the space has become an image.
The other objects apart from the piece of sheet metal are a short piece of a big branch, 4 clinker bricks, a large wooden frame covered with jute and partly covered with transparent plexi film and a piece of cardboard approx. A4 in size painted with pigments.
Near the door, two shelve-like objects made of bookbinding cardboard are fixed and aligned on the wall. Each object contains a crumpled piece of aluminium foil dyed black. They seem light as flakes of ash.
The room installation is held together by a dark, heavy green coloured stripe that runs through the room along the lower half of the wall. Dark brown glazed wooden brackets hang or lie in four places throughout the room.
Depending on where you stand, they suggest a different space.
The view from the window – to the left – onto the former prison, – to the right – onto the roofs of a group of detached houses arranged in rows, is distortedly reflected by the plexi film stretched over the jute.
‘... And leave a Day at every Door ...’ is a line from the poem no. 888 by Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886) from 1864.
The line of poetry is not an interpretation of the installation, nor does the installation interpret the poem. I chose this line as the title for my work because the possibilities of understanding are unrestricted and ambiguous, which is also what I wish for the interpretation and perception of the spatial installation.
Media:
Sheet metal, wood (Mdf, spruce), stem (sycamore), clinker, dispersion, varnish, jute, plexi film