Attic
audiovisual installation
City Museum, Münster 2001
A dark room. Within, colorfully lit objects of daily use, worn and out of fashion. Some seem to float, some are strangely altered - the portrait of a soldier on a breakfast board, the black single record instead of a knife in the bread slicer. Several monologues can be heard at the same time, the objects speak with my voice.
The monologues of the armchair, lamp, coat, suitcase, etc. intermingle and create a chorus. Slowly an image is assembling in the visitor's mind, an old single woman, who has obviously left the objects behind, on the attic (‚Speicher‘ in German, with the double meaning of storage and memory). They are - like the fictional owner herself - marginal existences, threatened with disappearance.
Subtle passages indicate that the old woman lived through the Second World War. In her personal history, an imprint of contemporary history is revealed. The objects have been the only witnesses to her habits and store and reproduce their memories. They relive all the actions that were performed with them through telling them again and again. Depending on which texts are audible at the same time, they give rise to new contexts of meaning, and sometimes the objects seem to answer each other..
Text example: The armchair
Things do not move voluntarily.
That is the difference.
She pushes me into the sun. A different warmth.
My fibers soak it up. Glow. Show their true color.
I savor her scent. Her weight.
I feel ashamed. Scuffed. Soggy.
I'm sure that's why she rarely puts on the light.
When she's alone, she pulls her feet up when she sits.
Sometimes she's very light. As if she wants to get up again at any moment. I hardly feel her weight.
Sometimes she is heavy. As heavy as the woman before her.
Her seat bones dig into me, her fingers dig into the fabric of my armrests. My springs groan.
I don't know anymore where she is beginning. Where I am ending.
Her skin is my cover, my fabric her shell.
She no longer moves voluntarily.
She will not get up anymore.
