Harte Zeiten – Ciężkie Czasy
Simone Rueß (2021). de-re-konstrukt – "Lass uns von vorne beginnen...", pp. 98-107
Simone Rueß (2021). de-re-konstrukt – "Lass uns von vorne beginnen...", pp. 98-107
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.).
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.
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).
___________________________Bergson, Henri. 1993. Denken und Schöpferisches Werden: Aufsätze und Vorträge, Hamburg: EVA Europäische Verlagsanstalt
The Hybrid Workshop Design
The workshop was conceived as a performative narrative in which diverse participants from various disciplines developed individual visual approaches in a collective action. Participants took part in the workshop both physically in the seminar room and online via Zoom. In the setting of the hybrid space, they were able to improve their sensory perception and skills in abstract illustration. In the compact time frame of 1h 45min, the workshop was structured around the collaborative creation of two large maps.
Read more about this Workshop at the Blogpost: https://sfb1265.de/blog/visualizing-narrative-spaces/
A large part of society is affected by dementia in the elderly; in Germany alone, there are currently around 1.8 million people (2021). Unnoticed by a large part of society, they usually live in a secluded everyday life. With the FRAGILE REMEMBERING project, Simone Rueß gives senior citizens with fragile memory a voice and makes the perception of dementia patients accessible on a visual-practical level.
The drawings presented in the Ernst Berendt House are based on personal descriptions of residents that Simone Rueß visited regularly from 2019 to 2022. In conversations, she gave them the opportunity to talk about their biographies. She gradually visualised their mental images in the form of drawings, which are shown to the interlocutors during further visits. The graphic approaches establish a connection to the experiences and emotions of the patients and bring to light further memories that the patients themselves or those close to them thought had long been forgotten. The artist also observed how the images could act as memory aids when memory became more fragile. She is interested in how the understanding of space is defined by childhood, the present, fellow human beings, objects, the environment or geopolitical events, depending on the ability to remember. The exhibition in the retirement home enabled an exchange with nursing staff, carers and relatives, which had a direct impact on the everyday lives of the patients.
Since September 2019, artist Simone Rueß has been visiting people with dementia in the Stephanus Foundation's Ernst Berendt House. In returning conversations, she invited them to describe their spatial experiences, which she then visualized in drawings. In 2022 she presented the series of drawings in the exhibition “FRAGILE REMEMBERING” on the site of the Stephanus Foundation, together with an site-specific installation in the Friedenskirche.
In the direct neighborhood of the exhibition FRAGILE REMEMBERING, the open air cinema Freilichtbühne Weißensee was showing a short film portrait of K. H. Stauffer, which documents the moment of fragile memory of biographical experiences. K. H. Stauffer fled with his family in 1945 from present-day Poland to the Rhineland-Palatinate, where he grew up with his family on a four-sided farm. He later managed this farm by himself for many years. Resettlement and escape as well as the Iron Curtain play a central role in his memories. In addition to a spatial biography album, which the artist is constantly expanding in collaboration with the protagonist, we see and hear three excerpts from the large-scale project “Space/Time/Resonance” (2022), in which Simone Rueß explores “how geopolitical caesuras are written down in spatial biographical narratives…”
Animation
Diagrams with a vertical historical timeline and a horizontal narrative timeline summarize the narratives (in this case narratives by K. H. Stauffer). Weightings of certain space biographical data become visible in relation to memory capacity. Superpositions and condensations reveal how certain experiences of respondents, influenced by geopoliti- cal 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.
Gendera, Marta (2014), Park Tysiąclecia, Millenium Park. Próby, szkice nowej przestrzeni publicznej, Zielona Góra:
Fundacja Salony, pp. 166-173
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.
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:
The project is realized within the framework of the Odra Partnership, in partnership with TRAFO Trafostacja Sztuki in Szczecin.
