From 2019 to 2023, Simone Rueß visited senior citizens with memory disorders in the Ernst-Berendt-Haus of the Stephanus GmbH in Berlin Weißensee and let them describe their biographical memories which she then translated into drawings. These conversations were the basis for a detailed artistic analysis in the form of double time graphs, which reveal weightings of certain biographical and historical data in relation to memory capacity.
A video gives insights into the conversations with the protagonist K. H. Stauffer. Originally from the region of Lviv, K. H. Stauffer’s family fled from today’s Poland near Wroclaw to Rhineland-Palatinate in 1945, where he grew up with his family on a four-sided farm. He later managed the farm himself for many years. He not only expresses his spatial experiences of displacement linked to current geopolitical conflicts, but also finds ways to describe his embodied limitations and physical restrictions as a senior citizen suffering from Parkinson’s disease. With the help of animated diagrams and a documented light installation, the film expresses the conflictual resonance of time and space along fragile remembering.
Corresponding to the short film portrait, the floating color installation portrays the space biography of another patient, representing and abstracting the biographical conversations over a period of 3 years. Based on diagrams, colored strips of different lengths materialize the narrated and remembered experiences. They rotate around their own axis, forming a kinetic landscape, expressing the constantly changing memory capacity. Each horizontal line materializes a conversation, each colored strip a sentence. Each color stands for a remembered person (relatives, friends, community, etc.).
Fragile Remembering, Friedenskirche
From 2019 to 2023, I visited senior citizens with memory disorders in the Ernst-Berendt-Haus of Stephanus GmbH and led them describe their biographical memories to me. I translated these into drawings, which could be seen on the ground floor of the Ernst Berendt House in 2022. In the form of a short film portrait, the audience at the open-air theatre Weißensee over the summer of 2022 were given insights into the world of perception with dementia. In the church on the foundation's premises, the resonance of the fragile memories was translated into a spatial installation and sensually experienced.
In a floating colour installation, I combine the 16 biographical conversations that I had with a dementia patient over a period of 3 years into a colourful spektum. In this way, I materialise the narrated and remembered interpersonal relationships of my conversation partner in the form of coloured strips of paper of different lengths. These hang on horizontally stretched strings and rotate around their own axis, forming a kinetic landscape. Each cord materialises a conversation, each strip of paper a sentence. Each colour stands for a remembered person (relatives, friends, community, etc.).
Von 2019 bis 2023 besuchte ich Senior*innen mit Gedächtnisstörungen im Ernst-Berendt-Haus der Stephanus GmbH und ließ mir biografische Erinnerungen beschreiben. Diese übersetzte ich in Zeichnungen, welche 2022 im Erdgeschoss des Ernst-Berendt-Hauses zu sehen sind. In Form eines Kurzfilm-Portraits bekamen Zuschauer*innen auf der Freilichtbühne Weißensee über den Sommer 2022 hinweg Einblicke in die Wahrnehmungswelt mit Demenz. In der Kirche auf dem Gelände der Stiftung wurde die Resonanz der fragilen Erinnerungen in Form einer räumlichen Installation übersetzt und sinnlich erfahrbar gemacht.
In einer schwebenden Farb-Installation fasse ich die 16 biografischen
Gespräche, die ich mit einem Demenzerkrankten über 3 Jahre
hinweg führte, zu einem Farbklang zusammen. Damit materialisiere
ich die erzählten und erinnerten zwischenmenschlichen Beziehungen meines
Gesprächspartners in Form von farbigen Papierstreifen unterschiedlicher Länge. Diese hängen an horizontal gespannten Schnüren und drehen sich um ihre eigene Achse und bilden zusammen eine kinetische Landschaft. Jede gespannnte Schnur materialisiert ein Gespräch, jeder
Papierstreifen einen Satz. Jede Farbe steht für eine erinnerte Person (Angehörige,
Freunde, Gemeinschaft, etc).
The installation is based on diagrams that were created for each conversation and which visualise the interpersonal relationships along the narratives.The composer Catherine Lamb reacts with her sound piece to the score-like conversation diagrams and makes the colour installation vibrate during the opening of the exhibition.
Der Installation liegen Diagramme zugrunde, die zu jedem Gespräch erstellt wurden und welche die zwischenmenschlichen Bezüge entlang der Erzählungen visualisieren. Die Komponistin Catherine Lamb reagiert mit ihrem Klangstück auf die partitur-ähnlichen Gesprächs-Diagramme und bringt die Farbinstallation während der Eröffnung der Ausstellung in Schwingung.
Hellblau für den Vater, rosa für die Mutter des Erzählers, rot für den Erzähler, und so weiter. Jeder Papierstreifen steht für einen Satz. Die Länge der Papierstreifen bezieht sich auf den Zeitraum, über den der Erzähler berichtet, und ist in drei verschiedene Papierlängen unterteilt: lang für das „Aufwachsen“, mittellang für das „mittlere Alter“ und kurz für das „Älterwerden“ in der Gegenwart und in den letzten 20 Jahren. Wenn der Erzähler 2 bis 4 Personen in einem Satz erwähnt hat, werden 2 bis 4 Farben zu einem Papierstreifen gefaltet. Erinnerungen an mehr als 4 Personen zugleich materialisieren die beigen Streifen: das soziale Umfeld, also die Familie, den Chor, mehrere
Freunde...
Light blue for the father, pink for the mother of the narrator, red for the narrator, and so on. Each paper strip stands for a sentence. The length of the paper strips refers to the period of time the narrator was telling about, divided into three different paper lengths: long for 'growing up', medium for 'middle age' and short for 'being a senior' in the present and the last 20 years. If the narrator mentioned 2 to 4 people in a sentence, 2 to 4 colours are folded into a strip of paper. If the senior mentioned more than 4 people, the strip is coloured beige for the social environment, which could be the family, the choir, several friends.
The strips of paper rotated slightly and echo the fragility of memory. Each string materializes one meeting. This slowly moving landscape, with its various heights, transforms the temporality of remembered interpersonal relationships into a spatial experience. Historical time is unfolded in hight, narrative space unfolded in breadth, the installation seeks to create an imagination of time that is shown to us in the form of a spatial shape (Bergson 1993, 25).
Die Papierstreifen drehten sich leicht und spiegeln die Zerbrechlichkeit der Erinnerung wider.
Diese sich langsam bewegende Landschaft mit ihren verschiedenen Höhen verwandelt die Zeitlichkeit der erinnerten zwischenmenschlichen Beziehungen in eine räumliche Erfahrung. Die historische Zeit entfaltet sich in der Höhe, der erzählerische Raum in der Breite, die Installation schafft eine Vorstellung von Zeit, die sich uns in Form einer räumlichen Gestalt zeigt (Bergson 1993, 25).
Zwischenmenschliche Beziehungen 2019-2022
Diagramme, Fragiles Erinnern ID01, G05-08, 2022, basierend auf 16 Gesprächen mit einem Bewohner des Ernst-Berendt-Hauses, Inkjet auf Papier, 50 x 60 cm
___________________________ Bergson, Henri. 1993. Denken und Schöpferisches Werden: Aufsätze und Vorträge, Hamburg: EVA Europäische Verlagsanstalt
space/time/resonance: 'How geopolitical caesuras are written down in biographical narratives…'
space/time/resonance: 'How geopolitical caesuras are written down in biographical narratives…', exhibition view at TRAFOstacja Szceczin, 2022.
Simone Rueß conducts space biography conversations with middle-aged participants and people suffering from dementia. Diagrams with a vertical historical timeline and a horizontal narrative timeline summarize their individual statements. In this way, weightings of certain space biographical data become visible in relation to memory capacity. Superpositions and condensations reveal how certain experiences of respondents, influenced by geopolitical caesuras, acquire more frequented resonance.
Light recording [micro-light installation] On the 18th of January, 2022, for the duration of eight hours, daylight was recorded on a sheet of paper with a small funnel in a darkened room on a micro scale while appearing on a monitor via a webcam. The digital light cone translates the phenomenon of filtering perceptions onto the screen (as a magnified sensor).
Sound piece by Catherine Lamb Filtered ambient sounds are the basis of the piece inter sum (2019). Taking into account the various transitions of acoustic perception between indoors and outdoors, Lamb applies a resonance band-pass filter to her ambient field with her synthesizer instrument, thus reflecting the constantly fluctuating field of attention.
Space Biographies – 2016–2022 (Variation I), Exhibition view at TRAFOstacja Szceczin, 2022. Light Recording and Animation, as part of space/time/resonance: 'How geopolitical caesuras are written down in biographical narratives…'
Exhibition view at TRAFOstacja Szceczin, 2022, You could be heading away from the endless middle and towards the bottom of the top* curated by Dagmar Schmengler, Michał Markiewicz, Stanisław Ruksza
About the exhibition at TRAFO Center of Contemporary Art in Szceczin, 2022, curated by Dagmar Schmengler, Michał Markiewicz, Stanisław Ruksza:
You could be heading away from the endless middle and towards the bottom of the top*
*idiomatic sentence used by one of the characters in the TV series Succession
The archive often serves as a certain model representing social mechanisms. It becomes a synonym for memory, power, and an argument in the discussion about the status of history and created images of the past. In practice it is not something that can be read like a novel, from the first page to the last. It appears to us as an infinite resource. It consists barely of pages in the usual sense of the word, but more of various visual forms: tables, photographs, documents, charts, images, disguised narratives. We look at them for a specific purpose or we browse freely, letting our desire to know drift. Having reached the bottom of the list, we find ourselves back at the top in (new) data to explore. In this sense, the archive never has a form that is definitive.
We usually make a use of it that combines two seemingly disparate gestures. We open it at first in order to search for a particular piece of information. Having found it, we browse further. We close the collection it contains only after wandering around like a labyrinth for a while. Waiting for the next time, equally useless or fruitful. By recalling this dual use, an apparently democratic archive can turn out to be a ‘double-edged’ ‘object’, dangerous, and even deceptively inverting the order of political and identity relations.
The subject of the archive, taken up by artists from Poland and Berlin, not only in the sense of a visual form of knowledge or a scientific form of seeing, but also in the ways of communication produced within its framework, comes down to tracing the disturbances found in the community space of our experiences. The juxtaposed artistic strategies show the archive as a living medium and a “moving place”, emphasising both its physical existence and the spatial construction that embodies order, without taking away its phantasmal character. In this way, they reveal the possibilities of subordinating the historically accrued and systematic dimension to current questions and doubts.
The project consists of three substantive components:
An online presentation during which every day from January 21, 2022 to January 30, 2022 invited artists presented their practices and working methods in direct or allegorical relation to the exhibition. The website mozeszuciec.com will be active from January 20, 2022.
Exhibition at TRAFO from Janury 17 until April 3, 2022
Experimental art-event in Berlin, in April 2022
The project is realized within the framework of the Odra Partnership, in partnership with TRAFO Trafostacja Sztuki in Szczecin.
