Amorphous

The sandwich box idea was presented to me in one and the same conversation in which there was also a discussion about Germany’s rather discomforting memorial culture, the way the country seems to have done its homework of remorse and presents the results in a more and more touristic setting of sites, monuments, documentation centers, and ghost walks. Although the two topics weren’t explicitly connected in this conversation – sandwich box, memorial culture - they kept sticking together in my mind like cling-foil to a sandwich.

The basic idea is to play with an amorphous shape/surface in public space - the expectations, anticipations, anxieties incited by a covered object (or figure?) soon to be publicly revealed. The initial image was that of an erect object covered by the green tarpaulin, so as to suggest yet another monument, or statue (the suggestion would be more general, not necessarily the regretful parts of history like the Shoah, or German colonialsm etc. For a second, I imagined myself to be underneath the tarpaulin, but that idea vanished quick as it came.) Expecting to raise in the random observer the questions, what this is gonna be and what for and why here? These three questions and possible responses or speculations, I then thought of as of crucial interest: What? What for? Why here? – addressing 1. the invisible object, 2. the imagined cause/claim/story/history, and 3. the relation to and information embodied in the location or space. (The site of a monument is among its most discussed characteristics. Most monuments are site-specific in a dramatic, sometimes painfully heavy way.)

But the idea went further and actually away from there, I think. (I am writing all this to show the garbage can, and because someone might say: Let’s go back to an earlier intuition). I think the connection amorphous shape/public space should be left more open, without a hidden agenda of the silly sort: “Let’s imagine people will think it’s a monument”. What remains interesting for me is the suggestion of an object made amorphous in public by a cover. Thinking about this: if something is plainly visible and discernible, it might be overlooked, become routine, therefore in a sense invisible. If it is not clearly identifiable, however, but rather an unidentifiable (not necessarily flying) object, an amorphous, suggestive, half-hidden presence it will likely cause reaction, and this reaction is likely to speak of the unspoken patterns of perceiving a space, it’s rules, it’s function, it’s aesthetics, it’s historicity. That which one knows or doesn’t know, suspects, expects, imagines about a space. Maybe it won’t – there is always the possibility of being wrong, but I guess I would make no sense without this possibility.

So now the idea stands as this: creating, exposing, presenting an amorphous shape/object (or more than one) by use of the tarpaulin. Now the question: Então? And then what? For a reason that I haven’t totally understood yet, it seems to me that the representation of the consequences should not be visual. The line of interest points underneath the tarpaulin to that which is hidden. I would like to follow that line and install there a recording device, audio, and merely record whatever happens in a set time frame around the object. I am tempted to think: Hopefully a lot of conversation, and revealing eavesdropping, yess!, people giving away their most intimate secrets, but again: maybe not. So the idea as it stands now, is to present unedited audio recordings taken from underneath a green tarpaulin creating an amorphous object in public space. I have the sudden feeling that this text makes an opposite sense, when one reads it backwards as the “no copyright” piece by Graw & Böckler that Catarina showed me yesterday. I won’t try.

The pics were taken over the last few years and might have entered the imaginary of the idea presented here. Stop me if this is crap.