MEMORY IN DIALOGUE

video (5h 32´, loop), monitor / 34x36x33 cm / 2016
light boxes: backlite-print, wood, lamps, varnish / 150x230x25 cm / 2016
picking table: MDF, metal / 96x60x95 cm / 144x60x95 cm / 240x60x95 cm / 2016
table lamps: metal / 80 cm / 2016
books: 180 pages, different colours / 19,5x18,5x1,2 cm / 2016

In MEMORY IN DIALOGUE, I go in search of traces of a personal and cultural identity and ask about the essence of the archive.

The basis for this is a slide archive mainly from the 1980s about my early childhood with around 3000 pictures. A time that, due to family discord and fate, can only be captured by material means. But what happens when communicative memory is extinguished and only the storage functions of an archive remain? Full of gaps and voids and a material half-life that is also limited, this archive builds up a new memory as it fades.

I made this transformative process inherent in the archive visible and developed it further in an intervention in the art library of HALLE 14 in Leipzig.

I translated and interpreted the private archive in three different forms, thus detaching it from the realm of the private: I condensed the individual slides, according to their format, into independent large-format landscapes, filtered and transferred the captions of the private image collection into register books and added associative thoughts, descriptions and comments to each individual image as a slide show on a monitor, so that this archive could be re-archived with a new form.