Writing from small publication related to the research topics of my practice, written in November 2024

THE CYCLE --- A social dynamic that feels like a contract        



It begins with a strong feeling of duty and responsibility. In response to this, you start to fulfill your perceived duty, which takes the form of physical and mental work. Physical labour as a gift to those you love. Consequently, the ideas of love and work get closer, so much so that they start to fade into one another. Resentment starts to build for what and who you love. As you cannot bear resenting the object of your affection, you start to feel guilty – the guilt feeds into the feeling of duty and responsibility. Work becomes a way to solve your own guilt, to atone for the resentment and to perform your duty. You will not know what it all started with - - Since I can remember, a lot of my values and priorities in life have derived from a sense of duty and responsibility; the most formative part of it was taking care of two old and sick horses during my teenage years. Feeling responsibility gave me a sense of purpose, feeling needed. It also gave me feelings of resentment and, in response to that, guilt. 

In my artistic work, I am continually trying to untangle these dynamics. 

I am very interested in the psychology of work and how it influences my interpersonal relationships and self-worth. This seeps into my work regarding both its content and my relationship to making. At times, it feels like I am taking care of my work rather than making it, as I deliberately keep choosing labour-intensive media, like 3D-animation, video games and sculptures that consist of different materials and parts.

To date, one of my most important work surrounding these topics is the video installation FEED THE HORSES (2022).



In this work, I digitally rebuilt the environment the aforementioned horses lived in, as well as one of the horses. The digital environment and the horse developed into 3D-animated videos that were part of a larger video installation. The monitors the videos were displayed on were embedded in concrete sculptures I had cast, weighing approximately 300kg and propped up on stones and at a wall. Another part of the installation were two Thuja trees and 7 Thuja tree seedlings, planted into an additional concrete basin and one of the sculptures that held the monitors.

Caretaking on several levels:
1; My relationship to the horses as a caretaker
2; Taking care of a memory by rebuilding it and therefore taking up space for it
3; Taking care of the plants that became part of the work.

             
                   














In relation to these topics, I have become increasingly interested in the writings and philosophy of Simone Weil, particularly her concept of Gravity and Grace.
According to her, “two forces rule the universe: light and gravity”. While she describes gravity as ruling all “the natural movements of the soul”, a force of descending motion that works analogous to physical gravity, grace is the only exception, a form of supernatural love, an ascending motion.
Gravity rules what we expect from others vs what we receive from them. To access grace is only possible when you are detached from gravity.
I first read about Simone Weil in “Aliens&Anorexia” by Chris Kraus, where Kraus assembles a philosophy of sadness and weakness through introducing the work of Simone Weil, as well as the artist Paul Thek.


I reencountered Kraus and Weil in an essay called “Becoming weak: Aesthetics of the feeble existence” by Kathrin Busch.
In the essay, Busch talks about weakness as a liminal space in between power and powerlessness.  

The realm of weakness offers possibilities for both extremes, being overpowered or completely overpowering. She goes on to talk about how next to the desire for empowerment, there exists an equal desire for disempowerment. I was struck by reading about this; the desire for disempowerment, how I imagine it, comes from a desire to escape from the burden of agency, that puts you in the possibility to become guilty of doing something bad; “I involve myself inexorabily in guilt”. At the same time, fantasizing about complete disempowerment doesn’t free you from your responsibility you have through having agency; instead, it makes it all the more visible.

The aesthetics of fragile existence want to show a self that is split in itself

The materiality of my work heavily connects to and leans on the dichotomy of heaviness and lightness. I am drawn to heavy/industrial materials from traditionally more masculine coded spheres (concrete, stone, steel, tech). I treat these materials with a lot of sensibility and contrast the heaviness with vulnerable topics. This produces situations of balance and tension, similar to the inner tension experienced in the described cycle of labour and guilt.
An artist that I have been very influenced by in regard to artistically working with these topics is the sculptor Berlinde de Bruyckere. I discovered her work in 2020, when I was living and studying as an exchange in Brussels. In January 2021, not knowing she had a show there at that time, I went to the Middelheim sculpture park in Antwerp and encountered her work “Onschuld kan een hel zijn”, Flemish for “Innocence can be a hell”, in one of the pavilions at the park. 


The installation consists of three large structures, made from wood and metal, that hold a manifold of different woolen blankets. Each of the blankets has a ribbon sown all the way around the edges that carries the title of the work on it.
In another pavilion of the park, an archive of images she had collected that influence her was shown and an interview with her was screened. In that interview, which I have since listened to several times, she talks about the ambiguity inside her work; for example in the form of the blanket that she uses as material and symbol, which she recalls comes from her childhood, where a blanket in her fathers car would either be used by her to snuggle up with on the backseat or to cover up a dog that they had hit with their car.


What was striking to me about this was how her work dealt with questions of guilt and responsibility; “Innocence can be a hell” referring to human inaction, which may be read as innocence, but can feel like paralyzing powerlessness. She talks about the feeling of trying to help others but ultimately feeling like it is never enough, and how this feeling turns into an existential guilt; trying to make small gestures, to smother the guilt, to fill a big void, but ultimately never succeeding. Her work, to me, speaks to a huge sadness felt within that dynamic, but on another level, to a commitment to try and make sense of it, to work through and communicate this feelings, or as she puts it: “I can offer these sculptures to help or comfort other people”. Her work is informed by a deep belief in the power of sculpture to actually bring about change, if people are open to deal with their own questions and needs when confronted with the meaning of a sculpture.



Even though my work is not and has never been purely sculptural, there is an emotionality I feel most obviously in making sculptural work that I carry into everything I make: Bringing something into the world, the belief that it should exist.
Digital work in animation and games as an extension of analogue space, as a means to communicate. Visualizing an internal space and state and working it into existence. Charging an artwork with emotion through the time spent working on it. Digital and physical work being dependent on one another as well as carrying dynamics of dependence within themselves: An installation with its parts so entertwined it cannot be called an installation, but instead becomes a single sculpture. All parts of it depending on each other.
Whether in digital or physical state, something I am always concerned with is making work that is alive, pulsating, but equally important: Keeping the work alive by caring for it. Making work that survives its separation from me.



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.





CIRCULARITY         SCHEMA        ITS HAPPENING AGAINAll you do is going home again
Lately I find myself recognizing moreand more circularity being present in my work. Circularity in the way that the same things keep happening – the same topics keep showing up – whether I want to or not –
Schema theory is a concept from psychology that describes how the brain structures knowledge. Our brains add every new information we learn into a box of information about related things it has already gathered. The boxes have been filled since early childhood and we use new information mostly to cement what we already know --- or rather, the way we perceive new information is structured by our previous experiences, the Schema we already developed, the stuff that is already in the box.
Am I destined to repeat?  Am I a self fulfilling prophecy?