BEDROOM CULTURE 4 EVER
Foundation and anchor point of my practice
The beginning of my work heavily took place in my bedroom as a space of exploration and safety. It was my first connection to building an environment that reflected who I was and that I felt comfortable in. Building objects for my teenage bedroom became my first introduction to sculpture, my bedroom a container of meaning. To this day, this process of building a container of meaning and (atmospheric) environments, both in virtual and analogue form, remains important in my work. 

In my research about bedrooms I stumbled upon the term Bedroom culture. It is used to describe the crucial part bedrooms play in the development of young people as sites of cultural production and self-exploration.
When the term first emerged in the 70s, namely in the research of Angela McRobbie and Jenny Garber, it was used to highlight the subculture of teenage girls that largely took place in private spaces, in opposition to street-based subcultures of teenage boys. In more contemporary research of the term, though, namely by Siân Lincoln, this gender binary has been increasingly dissolved, looking at the teenage bedroom with more complexity; especially considering the influences that social media and the virtual have on a classic dichotomy of private and public spaces.

Looking at the writing of Siân Lincoln, a couple things were really striking to me: She describes teenagers’ private spaces as a message that they send to themselves and others, a message about themselves and what they like. Changes in the room not only represent the teenagers growing up, but also their self-regulation that is carried out and expressed in the environment they build for themselves. The environment turns into a complex visual text, with the objects changing and evolving with the bedrooms occupant. Both the objects and the way they are styled by their owner create meaning.
 




What is fascinating to me about this relationship between teenagers and their bedrooms is how this process is something very naturally artistic, sometimes sculptural, a visual communication that is meant to represent you to yourself and others. I find huge parallels between my need to style my bedroom, which has carried on into my adulthood, and the way I treat my studio space. In both, there is visual representation of things that influence me, inspire me, notes for things that I should not forget about, and objects I like (and in the studio space: things I work on, of course). On top of that, it is a living, breathing environment that needs to stay in motion, connected to me and my current state of mind. If it stops adjusting, the environment feels dead, dusty, I start feeling cramped into a past version of myself.

Something that is very much drifting from this concept into my sculptural work is the idea of physical closeness to sculpture. A sculpture as an object that you not only look at, but physically coexist in a room with. How can the exhibition space become not an imitation of a bedroom or studio space, but take this quality of coexisting and living with objects into it?  Rather than trying to invite someone else into an intimate environment, to create an environment where someone will spend just enough time in a space with your objects and sculptures to develop their own connection to them. Looking at sculpture not by walking around it, but by sitting next to it. Looking at an object from the corner of your eye. An atmosphere created by objects that you spend time in the space with instead of walking through it to look at the objects.








In my own work, I have explored this interest by making works in media that require time to consume (like a video game and a book) and placing them in an exhibition setting with my sculptures and installations. Visitors focusing on the video game or the book, but being present in the room with a sculpture, then looking at the sculpture and seeing a connection to the video game or book they interacted with. 
To be honest, I am not sure how well it has worked so far. In some cases I think it did, like when I showed a video game about growing up in suburbia in a show and had an installation reminiscent of cables between electricity pylons hung high up in the space, above a visitor who would be playing the game. If they looked up, they could connect the experience of being under the cables to the environment shown in the game, but the cables could just as easily be overlooked. In other cases, I feel like this concept didn’t work, and instead I ruined a perfectly good sculpture by cramming it into a way too charged setup. Do sculptures need personal space sometimes, too?





There is a seamless connection between physical and digital space when it comes to bedroom-like spaces. In the setting of the bedroom, there is a consistent interaction with the digital space; the digital space having potential to either be a private or a public space. Lincoln says that young people often find themselves in a state of being in between things, because they constantly shift between different spheres: Private, public, digital, physical. The physical bedroom, in this relation, can function as an anchor, a grounding space in between the chaos of feeling like your identity is under construction in and spread out over different spheres. At the same time, the use of digital media can resemble the use of bedroom spaces, in the way that it also becomes a collection of, in this case, photos, videos and text that form a personal identity space.

I am very interested in the personalization of digital spaces, not only in social media, but especially in my practice with video games and animation . I find myself drawn to works in these media that carry something personal, as to me, both video games and animation can work very well as tools to visually communicate intangible emotional states via digital environments.  They can be a time and space capsule – creating places one can digitally “visit” that are long gone, far away, or have never existed in the way I want to show them.
In my own digital practice, I create video game and animation pieces that often reference physical spaces, like my own bedroom (current and past) or a highway bridge from Hamburg, the city I was born in. 


Using these spaces in my digital practice allows the player or viewer to visit them and take part in an experience they otherwise could not take part in, and allows me to change and fictionalize parts of these spaces while keeping other parts true to their analogue equivalent. Creating these spaces digitally, to me, is a re-building of them rather than a simple recreation, meaning that the process of building makes me (re)consider a lot about the space I am building and my experience in it, as well as what it is that I want a viewer or player to experience. Rebuilding personal spaces from my past additionally feels like a reconnection with and an act of care for past versions of myself.




The sense of in-between-ness caused by the constant shifting between worlds leads me to physical liminal spaces and suburban teenage worlds.
Industrial architecture, in form of wind turbines, electricity pylons, construction cranes, as well as (sub)urban liminal spaces (a highway bridge at night, an empty parking lot lit by dozens of streetlights) have gained importance in my work, both as environments, but also as a collection of symbols or even characters. This ties back to the idea of coexisting with objects and sculptures: Through coexisting with these pieces of architecture, first electricity pylons, streetlights and wind turbines in suburbia, later on construction cranes in the cities I moved to, they started to become emotionally charged to me . To a point where I started to see them as not only objects, but some sort of companions, guiding me through the night.