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.).
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.
